How big are the commitments here? I’m having trouble finding actual dollar amounts. Does this actually represent an infusion of money into these SMR efforts, or are these “commitments” tied to so many missable targets that it’s actually meaningless?
Oklo in particular seems to be total vaporware, I can’t find a single technical picture anywhere of anything this company’s reactor is seeking to do. They seem to raise money based on a rendering of a ski lodge.
A huge, concrete investment in TerraPower would be more interesting, but as a molten salt SMR which has never been built, this also looks extremely non-committal.
SMRs in general seem like a dead end, we’ve heard about them for decades and they don’t seem to be any closer to making nuclear power buildouts less expensive.
Everything that makes proven nuclear power plant design expensive seems to revolve around the same drivers of expense for all long-term construction: large up front capital requirements, changing regulations, failure to predict setbacks, and pervasive lawsuits. SMRs purport to tackle a couple of these (shorter-term builds, fewer setbacks), at the cost of considerable efficiency, but so far this seems like an inferior alternative to “just get better at building proven nuclear plant designs”.
China are building dozens simultaneously, and even with their questionable workers rights, safety and environmental practices, they cost $7 Billion a pop.
A dozen $7B nuclear plants is $84B, which is incidentally almost exactly the estimated cost of the SF-Gilroy-Palmdale plan for California's high speed rail. If you count all of phase 1, the P50 estimated cost goes up to $106B. That's the equivalent of 15 nuclear plants.
China has over 28 plants in progress, which should provide a total of >32GW of capacity when they're completed. That's 32×24×365= 280TWh of electricity per year. California's total electric grid in 2024 produced 216TWh.
Which is to say, $7B is a huge sum. But as far as infrastructure goes, China is currently building 130% of all of California's generation capacity that'll be complete within a decade or so, for much less than double the estimates for a high speed rail system that'll serve almost nobody by 2038.
$7B is a lot of money. But it's actually a very reasonable amount of money because the projects are actually happening. 28 $7B projects in the US are actually probably closer to a trillion dollars in investment for far less net public good over five times the timeline.
Whether they run over budget (or whether this is an under inflated figure) is yet to be seen, but it would seem that China is bringing the cost down, and substantially.
I'm not a nuclear expert by any means, but from the reading I've done, they're largely designing and building the reactors themselves these days. And it seems that to help keep the cost low (among other reasons), they're also helping other countries build them.
There was a recent study from Chain where they assess their own 4th generation Nuclear Reactor programme as being at least 10 - 15 years ahead of the west, and specifically said even that number is conservative estimate.
I wouldn't be surprised if they accelerate their time line and building target.
Yes, China have a good shot at doing it because they are building 33 simultaneously now and they have questionable workers rights and environmental policies.
As I said, if a developed country can do half what they’re doing (ie twice the price and double the construction time) in the next 20 years it would be a miracle.
It's not really a fair comparison though, is it? Is a questionable environmental policy worse than a bad electric grid? America has a dirty grid that has fairly limited capacity. How many fossil fuels will we burn (producing electricity, and powering non-EVs) because we aren't building nuclear? The environmental benefits of having nuclear power probably largely make up the difference (if they don't exceed it), and that's over the time scale of a century or more where we'll need to catch up.
Workers rights I have no real knowledge on. But China isn't known for their track record on any kind of rights, and arguably US blue collar workers have a pretty awful quality of life that the government largely doesn't take the blame for (because we don't have state-run healthcare and minimum wage doesn't keep up with the cost of living). China has forced labor, America has legalized slavery in the prison system. Plenty of American industries rely on the unethical use of migrant labor while the state disappears those same people to "alligator alcatraz" or overseas prisons. I don't know the full extent of how bad things are in China for the kinds of workers who build these plants but I am hesitant to overlook how bad things are in the US.
It's also a country that doesn't seem to care if the project is not cost-effective from the PoV of western companies. This is always a salient point missing from most conversation about the US and by extension the Western world; the advocacy of cheap energy are hiding the argument that nuclear power is both more consistent in power delivery and cleaner (arguable with the nuclear waste ofc) than any alternative currently available.
Remember those systems are non-intermittent and have lifespans of 50 years or more. Server farms are not amenable to load shifting, they expect round the clock power. Trying to power them with intermittent sources would need very hefty power banks.
If this nuclear plant has 2 GW of power output, were talking about 2.4 billion dollars to store 12 hours worth of the plant's output assuming $100 per KWh of storage.
Your numbers are off. Korea + China ~ 2500 $/kw, USA ~ 6-9000 $/kw. ` GW ~ $2.5B. A large portion of that is dealing with archaic regulations and very long timelines. Important to have regulations that are functional protect the public but also don't inhibit industries growth (which were the design of Nuclear regulations in the 80s).
Nuclear is never getting cheap [1]. Nuclear reactors need to be large to scale [2]. As for why SMR persists? Because someone makes money selling the idea. That's it.
And SMRs get sold is the very idea you state because it sounds compelling: the more you build, the cheaper it gets.
Nuclear seems like it should work. But there are massive unsolved problems like the waste from fuel processing, processing the spent fuel, who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents. Despite there being <700 nuclear reactors built we've had multiple catastrophic failures. Chernobyl still has a 1000 square mile absolute exclusion zone. Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
Yet this all gets hand-waved away. Renewable is the future.
> who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents.
I personally trust the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I also trust the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the regulatory bodies in the UK and the EU.
Why?
The failure modes are not binary. A reactor is not just operating fine or going boom. There are multiple small failures that can happen, and you can get an idea if a country's nuclear fleet is run with safety in mind or not.
Chernobyl happened during a safety exercise, an exercise that was attempted 3 times before and failed 3 times before. In principle the plant should not even have been allowed to operate until the exercise had been completed. The exercise was supposed to demonstrate if in case of reactor emergency shut-down the cooling water can be kept circulating in the core for one minute, the amount of time it took for the Diesel generators to ramp up power; it was an essential exercise to perform before starting full power operations. The fact that the plant was allowed to operate for 3 years without completing this exercise - no, actually, while failing this exercise multiple times, tells you a lot about the safety mentality of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union.
In the US, the NRC performs a lot of monitoring, and the results are published. For example, here's [1] a dashboard of performance indicators. There are 17, such as: Unplanned Scrams per 7000 Critical Hours, Unplanned Power Changes, Residual Heat Removal System, Reactor Coolant System Leak, etc. Out of about 100 reactors, you can see only green, with the exception of one yellow; that yellow is for the Palisades plant that is not currently operating, it is in the process of restarting operations, and I am sure it will not be allowed to restart until all the performance indicators are green.
I more or less agree with your comment but feel it should be pointed out the CSIRO economic feasibility study is specific to Australia.
The arguments made there; why Australia is better to pursue renewables now rather than hope for nuclear eventually have no bearing on, say, China's use of nuclear for 20% of Chinese baseload.
A large part of the CSIRO argument is the greenfield standing start no prior expertise massive upfront costs and long lead time to any possible return.
China, by contrast, has an existing small army of nuclear technologists, multiple already running reactors, and many reactors of varying designs already in the design and construction pipeline.
Even China who committed to significant nuclear capacity and wanted to ramp up their nuclear percentage to 20% (IIRC) is slowly moving away. The percentage of nuclear has in fact reduced over the last 5 years and initial commitments/projections of nuclear capacity are likely not going to be med. The whole reason being that solar (and to a lesser degree wind) have become so cheap that nuclear just doesn't make economical sense even for China.
China is a special case. In fact, it's the one country on Earth I'd actually trust to build, maintain and regulate nuclear power.
I don't believe China is convinced (yet) of the long-term viability of nuclear power (fission or fusion) but, like with many things, they're hedging their bets. In the US? It's just another opportunity to transfer wealth from the government coffers to private hands through a series of cost overruns, massive delays and under-deliveries.
China's advantages here are extreme. They have the manufacturing base, would likely use the same plant designs in multiple places (rather than a separate procurement process in every city or province) and they have a bunch of existing infrastructure that gives them options, like they're pioneers in UHVDC transmission lines that might make it more viable to build a nuclear reactor away from populated centers. Even UHVDC development was to solve a largely China-only problem: the power generation is mostly in the west part of the country whereas the people are in the east.
And yes the CSIRO report is Australia-specific but the timeframes for building nuclear power in the US are similar: 10-15 years. Starting today it's unclear if such a plant would be online by 2040. Yet we can build solar in months.
That's the other part of this: if we're just looking at data centers, theyh can be placed anywhere. You can ignore where fiber runs. You just build more fiber if you have to. DCs need power and water, basically. The Southwest is very efficient for solar [1] but light on for water. There's the Colorado River but that's been tapped beyond its limits already.
Along the Mississippi is another option. Not as efficient as the Southwest for solar but water is plentiful. Inclement weather is an issue though, both tornadoes and the winters.
- Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely
- Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
- Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
- Multiple catastrophic failures: sounds bad until you realize that you can name only two:
1. Chernobyl: old flawed reactor design, basically impossible today, a few unfortunate deaths among first responders in the cleanup, that's it
2. Fukushima: no radiation deaths. You would get a higher dose of radiation flying to Japan to visit Fukushima than from drinking the irradiated leaked water there.
> upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
Where are you getting this number? According to https://cnic.jp/english/?p=6193 it was estimated at JPY 21.5 trillion (roughly USD 150 to 190 billion).
> Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely
This is simply untrue. Depending on the type and enrichment of the fuel it will need to be actively cooled for some period, possibly decades. After that you can bury it. You need facilities for all of this. You need personnel (done by the NRC currently) to transport and install new fuel, remove old fuel and transport it to suitable sites as well as manage those sites. Before they even make it to storage sites they'll typically be stored onsite or in the reactor for years.
> Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
Given the current administration, almost nobody. The state of drinking water in places like Flint, MI is a national disagrace. The continued existence of lead pipes that leech lead into drinking water in many places is a national disgrace. The current administration gutting the EPA and engineering the Supreme Court to overturn things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are just the cherry on top.
A significant ramp up of nuclear power would necessitate a commensurate ramp up of the NRC in all these capacities.
> Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
Like I said, hand waved away.
> Where are you getting this number?
Multiple sources [1][2]. Fukushima requires constantly pumping water to cool the core. That water needs to be stored (in thousands of tanks onsite) then processed and ultimately released back into the ocean, which itself is controversial. Removing the core requires inventing a bunch of technologies that don't exist yet. The decomissioning process itself is something most of us won't live to see the end of [3].
The $1 trillion and a century for 1 nuclear plant. Pro-nuclear people will point to the death figure because it suits their argument. It's economically devastated that region however.
And as for Chernobyl, billions of euros was spent building a sarcophagus for the plant, only to have the integrity of that shield destroyed by a Russian drone.
Yes, because others were mostly not affected by the Fukushima disaster despite being in the impact area. Why? Because they took safety precautions. Onagawa was closer to the epicentre, but they built on a high embankment and did not flood and lose power.
Anti-nuclear people conveniently ignore, because it suits their argument, that Japan is restarting their nuclear energy program. They finally understood that there's no other viable option for energy security, price, and achieving decarbonization goals.
The issue with spent fuel has to do with the long term (essentially permanent) storage part and is purely political. It's a solved problem except for getting approval for the solution.
The other fuel issues you mention are already dealt with today as a matter of course. It's just the final part that remains up in the air.
You are the one hand waving about failure modes. As with aircraft, as failures have happened we've learned from them. New designs aren't vulnerable to the same things old ones were. All the mishaps have happened with old designs.
Personally I think the anti-nuclear FUD that the climate activists push is unfortunate. We would likely have been close to carbon neutral by now if we'd started building it out in the late 90s.
That said, I'm inclined to agree that solar might be a better option at this point in environments that are suited to it. The batteries still aren't entirely solved but seem to be getting close. In particular, the research into seasonal storage using iron ore looks quite promising to me.
> The combination has had a toll on Japanese automotive (and other) exports. Barring Fukushima’s impacts, one would assume a return to pre-2008 fiscal meltdown exports by now. But basically they’re static. That’s in the range of $200 billion in lost exports just for the automotive industry.
>
> It’s likely fair to attribute $20 to $50 billion of that to irrational fear of radiation.
Like, are you serious? This is the most bizarro accounting I've ever seen.
> ...that’s about $100 billion in extra fuel costs.
And now it's counting as part of the cost of Fukushima the fossil fuels needed to replace it. Even more wacky accounting.
> another $22 billion for unexpected health costs due to burning extra fossil fuels.
It continues to get even more wacky, if that was possible, by attributing this cost to the Fukushima disaster. These are costs that would be avoided with a strong nuclear electricity generation program! These are arguments in favour of nuclear! It's not cost-effective for Japan to cover their land mass and offshore areas with solar and wind arrays! They have regular earthquakes and typhoons which would knock these vast arrays offline and take massive amounts of time and money to get back online!
You said: 'Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.' The sources you provide don't provide the numbers or, if they do, they include bogus numbers that actually make the case for nuclear.
They should focus research on thorium reactors as they are supposedly cleaner than what we have today, and afaik you can actually use the fuel waste again and again, so it drastically reduces the problem of nuclear waste and what to do with it.
The promise of thorium is that it requires external energy to be added to maintain the reaction. The theory is that it is safer because of this as it's far less likely that you get a runaway or out-of-control reaction.
The reality is more complex [1].
Molten salt reactors are another active area of research but they have been for decades as well.
> But there are massive unsolved problems like the waste from fuel processing, processing the spent fuel, who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents. Despite there being <700 nuclear reactors built we've had multiple catastrophic failures. Chernobyl still has a 1000 square mile absolute exclusion zone. Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
sigh same low-tier non-issues brought up over and over again by people with no idea what they're talking about.
Look up some hard data before you speak.
- A nuclear reactor produces a tiny amount of waste per unit of power generated and it's all solid. Most sites just store it on-site because why not? Containment of small amounts of solid waste is as big of a non-issue as can be, obviously.
You realize our current energy generation revolves around burning up coal and gas and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere right? Right? And that those waste products include radioactive materials that you're so fake worried about?
You're out of your mind, completely gone in terms of what's actually happening right now vs what you're worried about. Detached from reality.
- Who can be trusted? We've had nuclear reactors for 50+ years, so... the same people that are already doing all that? What sort of a question is this? You're asking how to do something we're already doing.
- As for accidents, again, look up any data in existence. Nuclear is the safest energy production method by far, and yes, it's safer than e.g. solar. The fact that all you can point to are two accidents that have barely cost any lives at all proves that.
The very tsunami that caused Fukushima in the first place claimed 20 000 lives and all you can speak in regards to the plant is economic damage. Laughable.
You're displaying insane levels of ignorance. Look up data before you speak. Even consulting an LLM would have been better than just making stuff up.
Cheap-er, not cheap. They’re still fundamentally massive complicated constructions. They will never be as amenable to mass production cost reductions as things like solar and battery
Can we please not have these "slightly improved language" comments? You're arguing against something I didn't say and making a meaningless nitpick on word choice.
you literally said "cheap" and the comment said "cheap-er not cheap". I think the comment is correct and you are wrong. China is building the same design again and again and again. And it's still not cheap.
i'm sorry it came across that way. let me rephrase.
"cheap" to me implies it is affordable in a relative sense, compared to other options. It will almost certainly never be cheap - even if we make it cheaper through more production, it is going to remain in the group of the least affordable power generation technologies.
tbh i don't think either the original or improved language post is presenting effectively because they both just give a conclusion without any nuance, explanation or support. "cheap" cheaper who cares? $/kwh matter. transmission costs matter.
If you have credible figures then present them with citations. Otherwise you're just hand waving.
I don't think anyone will dispute that the initial build out for solar is far far cheaper. That much is self evident to everyone. The devil is in the rest of the details.
>I don't think anyone will dispute that the initial build out for solar is far far cheaper.
OK.
>The devil is in the rest of the details.
Now, this is "hand wavy" instead of answering my question and pointing to sources who support the up thread claim that nuclear will be "cheap" v. alternatives.
Do you have an LCOE study showing nuclear as "cheap"?
Okla really seems like a meme stock. Their original design was rejected by the NRC, so they are very far from ever breaking ground.
I don’t understand why their valuation is so high. Why not just take all this money and build an existing, approved design?
I will be very surprised if Oklo makes it. Insiders have been selling a fair bit over the last couple years because my speculative guess is they know that they cant possible meet the expectations in the market for their product.
They essentially got a ton of traction because Altman was on the board (but since left) but most (not all) tech people don’t understand deep energy problems.
Basically it sounds like what happens in failed countries:
> “It’s not like the NRC asks for an extraordinary amount of information,” said a former nuclear official who was involved in reviewing Oklo’s failed application and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their work in the industry. “The NRC asks three questions: What is the worst that can happen, what are the systems, structures and components in your reactor that prevents that from happening, and how do you know that?”
>“Oklo would only answer them at a very high level,” the person said. “They wanted to say nothing bad can happen to our reactor.”
>DeWitte said Oklo had planned a robust public rebuttal but claims that at the time, NRC officials “threatened us, in a retributional way, not to issue a response letter to correct the record.”
> “It’s not like the NRC asks for an extraordinary amount of information,” said a former nuclear official who was involved in reviewing Oklo’s failed application and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their work in the industry. “The NRC asks three questions: What is the worst that can happen, what are the systems, structures and components in your reactor that prevents that from happening, and how do you know that?”
This...does not square with the successful hamstringing of the nuclear energy industry by regulation over the past several decades.
Are you saying that the NRC asks for more than that? That there was a different process in the past? The big complaint I've heard about the NRC are changes required mid-construction, which happened last in the 1980s.
In the 2000s the NRC adopted a new licensing scheme at industry urging. What "hamstringing" are you talking about?
Okla would sound a lot more reliable here if they would have fought back with lawsuits with their accusations, or if the would release the communication now that there's no chance of this supposed retribution. As it is Okla makes all the talk of "hamstringing" seem like people not doing their jobs and trying to blame others.
Without speaking to Okla specifically--I think it's completely reasonable (if not accurate or charitable) to assume they're avoiding as much compliance as possible--the simple fact is that, under the watch of the NRC, there have been a tiny number of licenses issued.
If your agency's job is to regulate something and you've done it so successfully that barely anybody has actually gotten a license--all while complaining about compliance costs--maybe you're the problem.
Had the fellow said "Oh, we have a really high bar for safety and compliance, and not everybody's able to handle that", it'd be fine. But, acting like "oh golly gee we're so easy to work with we don't ask for much" is brazen horseshit.
The data doesn't fit for NRC being the problem. Hell look at the Summer reactor that was approved alongside Vogtle in Georgia: construction failure, billions wasted, and none of it to do with the NRC.
Or any the other many many other reactors abandoned at various states of development:
There's an argument that the NRC could do things better, but placing all the well documented failures in the nuclear construction industry on the NRC doesn't make sense. Who are going to believe, the people who are always late and over budget, or the bystanders in the industry that have watched it all play out?
I'd like to see the source of your cost numbers, I've never seen a $/MW from the Navy's subs' and carriers' reactors that was defensible, even Construction Physics didn't want to come up with a $/MW number in their discussion [0]
But remember that with the Seawolf classes the cost was astronomically higher than in the Virginia submarine; high costs are very possible without the NRC and are frequent, and an excellent counterexample to show the underlying fallacy behind the "NRC must be reason costs are high" argument. And remember that the Navy can use highly-enriched fuel that we don't allow in civilian reactors, and that the military nuclear labor force usually gets the best and the brightest and that the civilian nuclear work force gets the leftovers.
The NRC could be the source of high cost, but if so there should be two clear pieces of evidence to show that: 1) clear examples of the NRC doing something to drive up costs, and 2) some example of what to do instead of the NRC, or differences with other regulatory schemes that we could adopt instead. In particular, I never hear the corrective action that people want to the NRC. Having the Navy license civilian power reactors does not seem feasible. The closest we got to suggested regulatory reform culminated with Vogtle and Summer's failure: combined licensing. The biggest benefit of the industry's request merely gave the builders enough rope to hang themselves with bad design and their own delays.
Over the last decade the US Navy has commissioned 1-2 new nuclear reactors per year. They currently operate 100 reactors, more than any other org on the planet.
The US Navy has managed a total of 273 nuclear reactors, 6200 reactor-years, over 177 million miles, averaging 4 new reactors per year over 70 years.
They have done this with a perfect safety record. Zero accidents. Zero injuries, zero deaths, zero environmental pollution.
US Navy Cost: $2 billion for 2 x 400 MW reactors in Ford-class aircraft carrier
NuScale: $10 bn for 500 MW reactor
Westinghouse: ~$8 bn for 1000MW reactor
Military reactors should be more expensive, not less, because they operate under harsher conditions. But they aren't, because the US Navy doesn't have to go through the NRC.
The expectation is that their close-to-Trump investors will push for the dismantling of the NRC, which is something Republicans wholly support, which will of course make their rejection moot.
Maybe but the underlying tech still needs to perform which, as i understand it from public docs, has not. No amount of clear runway will make up for an airplane not being able to take flight.
The NRC is now mostly composed of Trump appointees. They’ve been quietly doing that. His most recent appointee was just made chair. Expect permits for friends of the Trump family and heavy regulation for competitors.
Anyone could’ve picked up the mantle of fixing the NRC, which is an obviously broken agency. France transitioned the majority of its grid to nuclear back in the 80s. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, anyone could have picked up this low hanging fruit and fixed the problem. Nobody even tried.
Let's be honest it's one of the smartest and most useful place anyone could be investing - it's literally is whatever happens a way to contribute to mankind - even if it's just so that FB servers are off-grid ; it's still a huge win, I just hope Mark realize he has much more potential than what he is doing rn
The progress on 'nuclear' is so slow, that the same investment in Batterie and renewable would actually help a lot more around the globe.
We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive. Other forms are so far away from being useful, that the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete.
And the benefit? Every 3th world country and person can invest in small and big Storage + Renewable but they can't do the same with nuclear.
>We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive.
Refusing to build nuclear for decades makes it more expensive. If we start actually building reactors the cost will come down.
>the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete.
I would find this more persuasive if there were no new investment in carbon sources, but carbon sources have clearly remained competitive with batteries + solar, and global carbon emissions remain at an all time high. There's demand for baseload energy.
Building nuclear power stations includes a lot of labor-intensive hard to automate tasks like construction. Baumol's cost disease means it's getting even more expensive: rising general productivity leads to higher wages and higher costs in fields that cannot increase productivity as much as the general economic growth. That's why it's also still cheaper in countries with access to low-cost labor.
SMRs are a try to get out of it by building more but smaller reactors. The reality is however that nuclear has an issue with scaling down. Output goes down way faster than costs and most SMR designs have outputs far greater than what initially counted as an SMR.
Investment in renewable energy already greatly outpaces investment in fossil energy. The economic decision to keep using a fossil system is a different one than having to choose a new one. There's still problems that have no economically competitive renewable solution yet, but a lot of what you are seeing is inertia.
Base load electricity is simply an economic optimisation: demand is not flat, but the cheapest electricity source might only be able to create a relatively flat output. You'll need more flexible plants to cover everything above the base load. If you have cheap gas, base load does not make any sense economically.
For the last two years more than 90% of new power generation capacity added globally was renewable. Est 95% in 2025. So no, new carbon sources are not competitive.
Highly misleading stat. That's referring to capacity expansion, not new construction.
Prior energy assets go offline and are replaced each year. The report you cite is discounting all of that, looking only at expansion above the baseline, then taking total renewable construction and calcuating renewable total construction's share of expansion. Apples to oranges.
If you look at the chart in your own link you'll see that carbon construction investment exceeds renewables still.
Chart: "Annual energy investment by selected country and region, 2015 and 2025"
I would love for what you say to be true but it just isn't, even by that agency's own stats.
Not sure I understand your point. In the plot you mention what the OP said certainly holds true for China and Europe (less so for the US). Also the Charts plot investments not just new capacity investments, I'm not even sure how you distinguish between the two?
The OP said new carbon sources are not competitive.
ANY investment is by definition creating capacity that would not be there without the investment. If carbon were not competitive it would not get investment.
If you sum up all of the carbon and compare to renewables in the chart there's more new carbon investment annually globally than renewables. (Comparing the dark lines vs the green line)
Also this is ignoring "low emission fuels", which are still carbon sources, natural gas and the like.
If you check the chart "Global electricity generation of zero-carbon sources vs. fossil fuels, 2000-2024" you can see that carbon sources were at an all time high in 2024. Growing slower is still growing.
We ought to be shrinking these to zero. I'm very glad to see solar and wind growing but my point is nuclear is worth supporting as an non-carbon energy source that could replace some of this carbon load because of its baseload characteristics.
"Global investment in clean energy and fossil fuels" shows a decline in fossil.
And there are plenty of good reasons why the investment in fossil fuels is still there because these investments can easily be not because its is still competitive, but its still competitive because base costs have been written off.
Aka the replacment of that coal power plant might have been 'competitve' because the whole infrastructure around it is still there and usable, because they might just replace the main burning chamber. Because for current stability reasons its easier to add gas turbines or keep them alive as backup because the renewable energy build out takes more time.
Nonetheless, the overall statistics says that renewable + batteries are now the cheapest energy source on the planet. Locally it might not be doesn't change the fact.
And no we do not need nuclear for baseload. Wind and solar are capable of baseload.
Alone my 4 year old EV has a batterie of 100kWh which would allow a heat pump to heat a house for 2.5 days.
Also countries in the north like Canada has plenty of waterenergy for baseload and countries closer to the aquator have extreme amount of sun.
Earthenergy can be still used in the most northern countries.
Yes for sure it just doesn't happen because huge projects like this have to be aligned and coordinated on complete different scales.
Thats why the french build a reactor in UK.
Even the CDU/CSU political party in germany, who was in power for 16 years uninterupted wasn't doing it.
So whatever we wish or think would happen doesn't matter if the only ones investing in nuclear are techcompanies and as somone else stated, they do this primiarily for existing nuclear capacity.
But whats happening now is a renewable revolution. Batteries are very cheap now and get cheaper and easier to make and you need the manufactoring capacity for them anyway (cars, storage projects) that they will break up every other area like normal housing.
Especially because now it reached africa as a continent and asia. Its exploding.
And its very easy to just extend this potential. Many normal areas are still vacant.
A LOT of countries probably will either neve be able to afford nuclear or will not be allowed to have it anyway.
It's better than carbon. And solar + battery requires more carbon to produce than nuclear energy as there's a lot of mining and physical construction involved + you must overbuild to supply power or rely on non solar sources.
All for building solar. Do not understand the constant need to denigrate nuclear in favour of carbon sources while doing so.
(If carbon sources were at zero this would be a different conversation)
Nothing inherently wrong with steam, just as there's nothing inherently wrong with spinning rust hard disks or punch cards.
We are at the end of the tech curve for steam, we have pushed it hard and made some super impressive technology, but it's not advancing anymore. Supercritical CO2 might have some advantages, or other fluids.
We have zero-carbon tech that uses non-steam principles, and is currently on a tech curve that's getting cheaper than any thermodynamic cycle. We have storage tech now which is an even bigger revolution for the grid than cheap solar, because a huge limitation of the grid has always been the inability to store and buffer energy.
I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.
(BTW denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources, because they use the same mechanism, except for some natural gas turbines)
What is this, the hipster approach to technology evaluation? Steam conversion efficiency doesn't make sense as a metric for nuclear because (AFAIK) fuel consumption per watt isn't the primary driver of cost for that technology. Or am I mistaken?
> I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.
I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
I doubt name calling is a sensible basis for policy decisions.
It's actually hipsters that are into steam, you know, the steam punks.
I don't care about steam conversion efficiency as much as I care that steam Rankine cycle engines are a solved problem so there is no more technological advancement. One of the biggest advancements over the past decades is using a Britton cycle in front for natural gas, ie moving away from steam engines.
> I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
If I understand you, yes of course use the more competitive technology. Sticking with steam when there are cheaper alternatives is a poor idea. But moreover as we look to what people choose as technology improves, we will find that steam usage will be relegated to things like geothermal, which like nuclear has essentially free fuel, but doesn't have to go down for a month to refuel, has the potential for more variable generation instead of undesirable constant generation, and is far less complicated.
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
The critique is not name calling, it's pointing out that the technology is mature and not improving, unlike the technologies that are recolutionizing grid energy right now across the world. The number of applications that use fuel to generate electricity via steam are shrinking. Perhaps hydrogen in the future, if electrolyzers ever come down the cost curve, but it's pretty speculative.
Horse buggies still exist, but mostly as novelties. Steam generation is headed the same direction.
Nuclear has a few other major flaws: Uranium aka nuclear weapons risk, Dependency on uranium (yes china finally solved the Thorium issue but that happened this year?), geopolitical/terrorism risks (see ukraine).
And because i'm from germany: do you know that in bavaria, you still have to check certain meat for radioactivity?
> Nuclear is expensive even after the reactor is build.
Solar panels and wind turbines need maintenance too. And they have much shorter operational lives than nuclear power plants, meaning they'll need to be expensively replaced much more frequently.
> And I wouldn’t call it progress to still rely on steam machines for energy
Could you please explain your objection to steam-based power? Is it purely aesthetic, or is there some inherent downside to steam turbines that I'm not aware of? Also, concentrated solar power systems that concentrate sunlight and use it to boil steam[1] are significantly more efficient than direct photovoltaics.
> Could you please explain your objection to steam-based power?
My guess would be that you're taking energy that you burn, you then boil water, water then goes through a number of turbines, then to a generator and then you might have electricity. Every step in that process is not 100% efficient.
Direct PV is, sunlight, cell that generates current, current gets transformed into whatever the grid needs. So it's fewer steps.
Nuclear + Batteries could be nice too because the reactors will be always working at optimal rate without having to start/stop them to adapt to demand and let the storage manage peaks and lows. So investment in one domain can help the other too.
There's the "we forgot" hypothesis, but I think a more realistic hypothesis is the "we got too rich" hypothesis.
Construction productivity has stayed stagnant for more than half a century, while manufacturing productivity has sky rocketed and made us all fabulously wealthy compared to when the first nuclear reactors were built half a century ago.
I don't trust China's public cost numbers as much as I trust their actual capital allocation on the grid. And I will trust GE's numbers once they have actually produced something at those numbers, as pre-build cost estimates for nuclear are not believable due to their extensive track record.
Since you say ALARA made things expensive, maybe you can tell me how you foresee cheaper designs without it?
There's a lot of talk and some very shady science about getting rid of ALARA but nobody says what will change on the build that is causing the cost. Meanwhile China has adopted the same designs as in the West, without abandoning ALARA.
Those who advocate for changing ALARA see to be mostly trying to shift the Overton window on the public opinion of radiation rather than trying to pursue engineering and cost goals. I hope I am wrong on that!
The French transitioned the majority of their grid to nuclear back when I was a small child. Their electric prices are lower than Italy, Germany, or the UK. Of the big European countries, only Spain’s is lower.
They are also completely unable to build any new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 13 years late on a 5 years project and 7x over budget.
Their proposed EPR2 fleet requires 11 cents/kWh and interest free loans. Sum freely. With the first reactor coming online in 2038, if everything goes according to plan.
New built nuclear power in 2026 just doesn't square with reality when the costs and timelines are factored in.
They're just purchasing power from existing nuke plants. All this is doing is making a formerly publicly available resource private. This will drive up energy prices for everyone else. These datacenters need to build their own generation. When people talk about how important it is that the US lead innovation in AI what they're really saying is how important it is for their quarterly results
> Our agreement with TerraPower will provide funding that supports the development of two new Natrium® units capable of generating up to 690 MW of firm power with delivery as early as 2032.
> Our partnership with Oklo helps advance the development of entirely new nuclear energy in Pike County, Ohio. This advanced nuclear technology campus — which may come online as early as 2030 — is poised to add up to 1.2 GW of clean baseload power directly into the PJM market and support our operations in the region.
It seems like they are definitely building a new plant in Ohio. I'm not sure exactly what is happening with TerraPower but it seems like an expansion rather than "purchasing power from existing nuke plants".
If history repeats itself ... tax payers will be fitting the bill. Ohio has shown to be corrupt when it comes to their Nuclear infrastructure. [0] High confident that politicians are lining up behind the scenes to get their slice of the pie.
The weasel wording is strong here. That's like me saying that buying a hamburger will help advance the science of hamburger-making. I'm just trading money for hamburgers. They're trying to put a shiny coat of paint on the ugly fact that they're buying up MWh, reducing the supply of existing power for the rest of us, and burning it to desperately try to convince investors that AGI is right around the corner so that the circular funding musical chairs doesn't stop.
We got hosed when they stole our content to make chatbots. We get hosed when they build datacenters with massive tax handouts and use our cheap power to produce nothing, and we'll get hosed when the house of cards ultimately collapses and the government bails them out. The game is rigged. At least when you go to the casino everyone acknowledges that the house always wins.
Well in a way they are building their own generation by paying elevated prices for nuclear to keep it running, as most nuclear will be shutting off pretty soon due to cheaper alternatives.
Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive. Nuclear plants get more expensive the more of them we build, but for already paid-off nuclear reactors there's a sweet spot of cheap operations and no capital costs before maintenance climbs on the very old reactors.
Meta paying for all that very expensive maintenance is not a bad deal for others, unless market structure is such that the price for entire market is set by this high marginal generation from uneconomic aged plants.
> Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence.
But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.
Oops, that's a typo, should be transmission and *distrbution
Electricity costs have two components: "generation" to put power on the grid, and then the "transmission & distribution" costs which pay for the grid. You can likely see the costs split out on your bill, and the EIA tracks these costs.
Generation costs are falling, because of new technology like solar and wind and newer combined cycles natural gas turbines. However the grid itself is a bigger part of most people's bill than the generation of electricity.
Most utilities have guaranteed rates of profit on transmission and distribution costs, regulated only by PUCs. T&D tech isn't getting cheaper like solar and storage and wind are, either, so that T&D cost is likely to become and ever greater part of electricity bills, even if the PUCs are doing their job.
Generation in many places is disconnected from the grid, and when somebody makes a bad investment in a gas turbine, then the investor pays for that rather than the ratepayers. Look at Texas, for example, where even being at the center of the cheapest natural gas in a country with exceptionally cheap natural gas, solar and battery deployments hugely outpace new natural gas. That's because investors bear the risk of bad decisions rather than rate payers.
In places that let utilties gamble their ratepayers money, and where the utilities only answer to a PUC that gets effectively zero media coverage, there is a massive amount of corruption and grift and fleecing of rate payers.
A MW of nuke capacity is not replaced by a MW of solar or wind. New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission. Renewables without those things are worse than nuke - they are undispatchable like nuke and they are uncontrollably variable. We should build more renewables, but it is essential that we either tolerate intermittent system outages or massively improve transmission and storage, the generation is the least important part right now .
> New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission.
That's not correct, including storage with solar is still cheaper than nuclear. That's not measuring the cost by MW or GW, it's by measuring the cost of kWh, or the levelized avoided cost of energy, or the whatever metric you want.
And solar has the benefit of being able to avoid a good chunk of transmission by placing it at the site of use, so including transmission costs can only be to the benefit of solar.
You could just as accurately sum it up by saying they would like to tie up nearly 6.6 GW, otherwise they wouldn't be making quite as large a deal. They wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have a financial technique to afford it, and it's still taken a while to make the commitment.
What about less-well-heeled consumers who would be better served if the effect of increased demand were not in position to put upward pressure on overall rates?
To the extent that new debt comes into the mix, that's just an additional burden that wasn't there before and this is a very sizable investment at this scale. So the compounding cost will have to be borne for longer than average if nothing else.
Naturally some can afford it easily and others not at all.
I don't really get the antagonism with these ersatz concerns. when FB builds its own datacenters, or it's own chips & racks, or it's own algorithms absolutely no one is saying "well there's no profit motive to build a completely custom server chassis" or "oh no, theyre taking publicly available math and making it private"
Thank you for stating things so plainly, it's sorely needed on this site. The idea that success for big tech means a better society for workers or citizens is laughable and should soundly be rejected. They need to be broken apart yesterday.
Alternatively a more optimistic and high potential future is more plentiful and cheaper more reliable power and transmission is a huge win for society. So Id say its a perspective issue.
We in Ohio don't need more nuclear. The costs for maintaining what we have is already falling behind solar and wind (including batteries). Then there is the ecological costs that rarely get factored in.
And all these new datacenters are pushing up our electric bills. Maybe this deal could be competitive long term with newer reactor designs and if they are competently executed, but I'm very skeptical.
Mark is doing much more than should already, and not the good kind, no at all!
This have a slight potential of becomeing a good one, if we only dream good things. Very limited details here, pure corporate self paise dominantly, can become anything. Another bad for example.
The promise of small nuclear reactors, modular reactors, thorium or whatever else has really failed to materialize at the same time that solar and battery has just leapfrogged the entire field. Nuclear has some big advantages, but it's still mired in humongous upfront costs and the intractable issue of nuclear waste. And I think we're also about to see an explosion in enhanced geothermal. The good kind of explosion.
Well, because it means that other energy generation sources like oil, gas, and coal aren't being used there instead. Since they cause far, far more harm than nuclear waste does, it's a net win.
the waste isn't a win, of course, but is a downside of a tradeoff that is massively weighted to the upsides for society -- that is (otherwise) completely clean always-on high capacity energy production.
We understand very well how to safely handle nuclear waste and make it a very (very) low risk downside.
looking backwards in the supply chain for other externalities is a good point, but I'm not sure any energy production method is exempt from this?
Also, by the way, my perspective isn't about nuclear Vs X (wind turbines etc) - I like all the ones that are net clean and useful in different circumstances as part of a mix.
I'm just addressing the narrower point about whether nuclear per se is a net benefit for society, which I believe it is, massively.
I wish that Meta would pay for the extension of Diablo Canyon in California. They have had to jack up already sky-high electricity rates to keep it going, after deciding nearly a decade ago that it would be uneconomical to try to extend its lifetime.
Meta's nuclear intention is a perfect example of how tech is willing to pay far more for energy than other customers, and how it's driving up everybody's costs because we are all paying for that increase at elevated prices.
Nuclear is extremely expensive, higher than geothermal, renewables backed by storage, and natural gas. Nuclear is good for virtue signaling in some communities, but from the technological and economical perspectives, nuclear is very undesirable and unattractive. It's only social factors that keep alive the idea of new nuclear in advanced Western economies, not hard nosed analysis.
Here's a new preprint from Germans showing that even for Europe, a continent with very poor solar resources for many countries, new baseload is not the most economical route:
Geothermal energy is highly location-specific (it's great if you have a handy volcano nearby, of course), storage cannot meaningfully "back" intermittent renewables because it's only good for a few hours load from the grid (aside from pumped hydro which is effectively built out), natural gas peaker plants are very expensive and increase CO2 emissions. There isn't much of an alternative to nuclear.
Enhanced geothermal using fracking techniques developed in the past decades is being deployed now, and has very limited restrictions on where it can go.
> storage cannot meaningfully "back" intermittent renewables because it's only good for a few hours load from the grid
That's trivially untrue. If you can build a battery for four hours duration, then of course you can build another to get to 8, or however many you want. Batteries are being added to the grid at a huge rate.
> natural gas peaker plants are very expensive and increase CO2 emissions. There isn't much of an alternative to nuclear.
Gas peakers are about the same cost as nuclear. We will have a ton of gas peakers hanging around in the coming decades, and they will be used less and less as we get more batteries on the grid. Already, batteries eat peakers' lunch economically.
In the most optimistic grid modeling scenarios, nuclear can play a 5% or 10% role in a fully decarbonized grid. If you go full nuclear, then you also need a ton of batteries. And if nuclear was cheap, I would advocate going for a ton of nuclear plus batteries. But nuclear is super expensive, and doesn't scale fast enough to meet our needs.
We are currently at 20% nuclear power in the US and have a rapidly aging fleet. Even if we had investors who wanted to spend the $500B it would take to keep 5% of our grid as nuclear, it's unlikely we'd be able to build those 50 1GW reactors over the course of the next 20 years. Scaling SMRs seems even less likely.
I really hope I'm wrong and the SMRs somehow materialize and are cheap, but none of the startups are acting like the have anything real or the chops to scale. A new reactor getting built by 2032, as suggested here? Pumping out an SMR in 6 years, when design isn't even finalized, the company hasn't shown progress since abandoning an NRC application, does not seem plausible.
Meta's nuclear intention is a perfect example of how tech is willing to pay far more for energy than other customers
I believe their plan is to convert that energy into revenue at a rate that exceeds the amortized cost of generating the energy. It's not a social good project even though you interpret the cost outlay as such?
Nuclear isn't extremely expensive; in China it costs around $2/watt of power (compared to up to $14/watt in the US). It's just expensive in America because America's shit at building nuclear power plants efficiently.
Nuclear compliance and certification is extremely expensive. The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.
The largest cost associated with a new nuclear plant are the interest payments given that a plant may need to spend 10+ years sitting idle before it can be activated.
> The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.
That is not at all what I have seen, the costs tend to be from absolutely massive infrastructure needed to last a long time in harsh conditions that are difficult to repair.
Those seem more like fundamental engineering requirements.
Across four different regulatory structures: France, Finland, the UK, and the US, modern nuclear has proven to be excessively expensive and require massive amounts of high skilled labor. In the past century, high skilled labor was cheaper, but these days we need to pay welders and other construction workers higher wages because they have high productivity alternative jobs that pay better than in 1970.
Those high interest payments for 10+ years are also because EPC promises to build the design within 5-7 years then takes 2-3x the time. At Vogtle the fuckups both on design meant that many plans were "unconstructable" and then construction proceeded anyway with whatever they could wing together then they had to go back and make sure that whatever the bell was built still met the design.
What, we should have a wild west where everyone can set up their own nuclear power station without any compliance or certification? If not then these are part of the build cost... it's like saying we shouldn't include testing as part of the cost of building software.
They're not winding down per say, nuclear has stayed steady, renewables simply exploded. Nuclear understandably more prone to schedule delays, but now it's mostly execution delays in months vs regulatory delays in years. They're still on trend with nuclear year plans. Solar simply scales much faster because all the displaced construction worker from real estate slow down can slap panels but not reactors.
You can say the same for cars, houses, appliances, medical devices, elevators, stairs, disabled access, etc etc.
So, what exactly is your point? Yes, everything would be "much cheaper" if nobody had to pay as much attention to most details any more. Everything would also be much much more expensive for everybody else and longer term, or not work at all or reliably or safely.
It's a question of magnitude. Do you think that over-regulation of specific technologies is possible?
If the price of building stairs was growing each year in only the west to the point were we were opening one staircase 5 every years, it might be worth to ask some companies why. If they all say "the last guy who built stairs got bogged down for 25 years trying to meet all the safety standards". It might be time to relax some of them.
China is the world's largest electricity producer and installs a lot of generating capacity of all types. For example, China has 29 nuclear reactors with 31 GW of capacity currently under construction:
Which leads to a shrinking nuclear share in their grid. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
The nuclear share dropping is a very clear signal about a lack of investment. Shows that nuclear energy is no longer cost competitive, even in a "low regulation" environment.
It shows that strategic investment matters and people are looking at more than a single cost metric. Nuclear is behind today, but that doesn't hold a promise it will remain true into the future unless you stop investing now.
One armed bandit says explore as well as exploit. This delta you cited indicates the pendulum currently is more exploit than explore, but its not a static equation.
chinese nuclear is extremely cost competitive at 2.5bn/unit. They have other reasons, one being the ban on inland expansion fearing of messing up with 2 major rivers that feed the country. Current chinese units are basically borrowed and improved western designs, cap is basically vogtle's ap1000, hualong is a frankenstein of several western designs.
TBH this part seems key, even PRC couldn't operate full western designs reliant on western industrial capacity economically, part of it was simple incompetence of western supply chains (business closures / regulatory drama / sanctions). Nuclear seems viable once you strip out a lot of the politics that makes them uneconomical, hence PRC had to indigenize the designs since once western supply chains enter picture, the schedule goes out the window.
Two years ago we were installing 1/10th of Chinese solar today?
Where are we at today? Can we catch up under this administration?
Where do we compare on a nuclear basis? I know my state installed nuclear reactors recently, but I'm not aware of any other build outs.
In a war game scenario, China is probably more concerned about losing access to oil and natural gas than we are. Not that we shouldn't be building this stuff quickly either.
Renewables and battery storage energy are unstoppable. Why take nuclear risk when you can get more than enough from solar, wind, and geothermal coupled with battery storage?
China is a country with over a billion people, Meta is a private company with under 100k employees, it doesn't really make sense to compare the power output of their investments.
There are multiple measures, as generating technologies are complex. "Nameplate capacity" (given above) is one, "capacity factor", which is (roughly) the time-averaged output is another, and for solar averages about 20%, though that can vary greatly by facility and location.
Nuclear has one of the highest capacity factors (90% or greater), whilst natural gas turbines amongst the lowest (<10% per the link below). This relates not only to the reliability of the technologies, but how they are employed. Nuclear power plants cannot be easily ramped up or down in output, and are best operated at continuous ("base load") output, whilst gas-turbine "peaking stations" can be spun up on a few minutes' notice to provide as-needed power. Wind and solar are dependent on available generating capability, though this tends to be fairly predictable over large areas and longer time periods. Storage capability and/or dispatchable load make managing these sources more viable, however.
It is how individual power generation projects and measured though. If you install a GW of solar generation, it means you installed solar panels capable of generating 1 GW peak. If you install a 1 GW of coal generation, then same thing. If you install 1 GW peaker gas plants etc.
The coal plant will have a capacity factor of 80% though. Solar will be 10 to 20%. And the gas plant could be very low due to usage intent.
Battery projects are the same (since they're reported as generators). Whatever nameplate capacity...for about 4 hours only.
It's close enough to how it's measured. China's terawatt of solar power capacity isn't producing 9000 terawatt hours in a year. Their total electricity use is 9000 terawatt hours.
In absolute terms, China installs about as much nuclear as the US does solar. So I can only assume you agree with the statement "the US is bringing on an insane amount of solar energy"? Because, once again in absolute terms, the US's solar buildout is trounced by China's. The US is losing the energy race, and nuclear isn't going to save it. The US will run out of fissile material before China runs out of sunlight.
China is building a tiny amount of nuclear in comparison to their wind, solar, storage, and HVDC builds. Only something like 50-100GW over thw coming decades. The quantity being built only makes sense as a strategic hedge, not as a primary strategy.
Renewables crash the money making potential of nuclear power. Why should someone buy ~18-24 cents/kWh new built nuclear power excluding backup, transmission costs, taxes, final waste deposit etc. when cheap renewables deliver?
China is barely building nuclear power, in terms of their grid size. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity.
Again they aren't the same product. Everyone always thinks power is only about $/kwh especially in hackernews. That is a strong proponent of the product but most definitely not all of it. Solar just does not work for large scale industrial uses cases (99.99% uptime). Even with massive energy storage to try and cover the edges. Its a great combo but not comparable.
I had exact the same discussion here 5 and 10 years ago (it will be ready next year!), I'm willing to bet that storage isn't going to cut it in the next 10 years.
There's at least two of orders of magnitude missing with the current storage gen and unless a new tech revolution happens, that's not going to work.
The supposedly massive storage which is built in your link doesn't even cover half a day of winter load.
Anything below 200GWh is a proof of concept at best.
I remember those discussions. 5-10 years ago people were summing all electric cars, including ICE cars starting batteries, to prove the scale was irrelevant.
Now the goalpost is shifted to "not even a single winter day without any other input of electricity". Which is a high 90s percent decarbonized grid. Not fully decarbonized, but almost.
In California storage is now timeshifting 50 GWh daily. An expansion that has come in the last few years.
Battery prices are down to $50/kWh when not using extremely expensive western batteries. Which means in the near future 50-200 kWh systems attached to houses. Excluding the BEV providing demand response to also help shape grid demand.
I think you should update your priors to 2026 data. We're in the point of the S-curve where batteries goes from nowhere to everywhere in the blink of an eye.
Just like solar was almost insignificant in 2020 adding a mere 140 GW over the year while in the first 6 months of 2025 we added 380 GW of solar.
Storage is time-shifting a lot of energy but it can't do long periods of time in large volumes - still a significant problem. What you are referring to is small incremental changes (like peak shaving or demand response programs in single hour increments). And it isn't only a co-ordination problem (which many companies are solving) its a physical/physics problem.
I am all for energy storage and solar - I've worked extensively in both. Their continued growth is a huge asset for humanity. That said they aren't a panacea and doesn't cover the full spectrum of energy needs even with continued cost reductions - they have constraints due to the physical reality of the world and how power is produced.
California has huge power cuts and has the benefit of having a very mild winter on top of that (can we even call a 10 degrees celcius minimum as winter? Personally I wouldn't).I wouldn't use them as a successful example of anything.
> In California storage is now timeshifting 50 GWh daily. An expansion that has come in the last few years.
I don't think you realize the scale of the problem, France alone consume 90GWh per day in winter, yes one day. And that isn't going to be any better with all petrol consumption switching to electric.
50 GWh shifting is just a proof of concept at best.
And yeah sure, see you in 2027, for sure it will be the year of storage this time.
The storage and grid upgrades have essentially removed all power outages in California? Again you operate on old information.
On the other hand California do have an absolutely massive air conditioning load in the summer.
> And that isn't going to be any better with all petrol consumption switching to electric.
Electrifying transportation is expected to add 15-25% extra load. A load that is extremely flexible in when it runs and thus perfectly match renewable intermittency.
In 2025 alone China added 168 GWh of storage.
I think you don’t realize how much even 50 GWh of storage causes the entire Californian grid to transform.
> On the other hand California do have an absolutely massive air conditioning load in the summer.
Well good for them but the vast majority of the western world has the opposite load, reduced load in summer where the panels operate full capacity and massive consumption when they produce close to nothing.
> In 2025 alone China added 168 GWh of storage.
Great, and they use over 1400 GWh per day.
In 2025 alone, it means they added an astonishing 3h of electricity storage (I'm rounding it up for you as a bonus)
> In 2025 alone, it means they added an astonishing 3h of electricity storage (I'm rounding it up for you as a bonus)
That’s really good isn’t it?
It would be unusual for solar to produce zero during the day, and the night is presumably going to be around 12 hours (in terms of solar generation). Energy usage is presumably less at night too.
The storage is already meaningful, with 3 of the 12 hours of zero generation covered (assuming usage is flat over a 24 hour period, which it isn’t), and if they keep adding at that pace it’ll be very significant.
Yes, the missing piece here is most of the demand is in winter but most of the solar production in summer.
Daily load shift is a solved problem since the 70s with dams anyways, it's not the issue with solar. The issue is season load shift which is still science fiction as we speak.
Most of the time yes, but most of the time isn't a good answer when we talk about a grid. See the nuclear issue in France which had an even worse wind generation issue compounding the problem.
Not to mention the variability which is 10x worse than solar.
That is the expected variability? On-shore wind has capacity factors between 25-40% depending on location and size of wind turbine. That it reduces to 11% is expected.
Given that this happened once it is also quickly pushed higher by storage.
How would add nuclear power to this grid mix? Yes, that is over 100% of demand being generated by rooftop solar.
"Expected variability" is nonsense, you can't just say "yeah it doesn't work, that's normal"
> How would add nuclear power to this grid mix? Yes, that is over 100% of demand being generated by rooftop solar.
Absolute nonsense again, Australia has one of the dirtiest electricity generation of the developed world with 65% fossil. Nowhere near the totality of the demand is covered by solar, even if again they have almost no real winter.
> "Expected variability" is nonsense, you can't just say "yeah it doesn't work, that's normal"
Are you saying that hydro electric dams are nonsense because they store an intermittent energy source for later usage?
With renewables lowering the price floor it means that if you can utilize them you have a competetive advantage.
> Absolute nonsense again, Australia has one of the dirtiest electricity generation of the developed world with 65% fossil. Nowhere near the totality of the demand is covered by solar, even if again they have almost no real winter.
This is an australian state. Which often has 100% of its demand either covered by rooftop solar or wind power.
Without trying to brush the example aside, how would you add an inflexible new built nuclear power plant to the mix? How will you force everyone to buy expensive electricity coming from it?
Which storage can solve. The problem is that "base load" as we know it is dead. It was only ever an economic construct, never a physical one.
Distributed renewables are unraveling the grid monopoly, meaning you can't just foist enormous nuclear subsidies on the tax payers anymore. They will vote with their wallets.
Storage can not solve firming in most of the world, maybe South Aus being exception, maybe. It can be solved by gas peakers or gas peakers combined with bess if you go fossils way, or hydro if you have it or nuclear. In Germany it'll be gas+bess but mostly gas, according to their Fraunhofer ISE org. In UK it'll be mostly gas too. In DK it'll be imports from hydro rich nordics.
It's interesting you mentioned nuclear subsidies when Germany poured on it's EEG renewables scheme alone more than double the cost of entire french nuclear fleet, both adjusted in today money
Who cares if there's a tiny portion of gas turbines left (optimized for low CAPEX) when we've solved high 90s% of the problem?
Its like complaining about the 3% fossil gas usage in France today when we still need to decarbonize shipping, agriculture, aviation, construction etc.
It is trivial to run gas turbines on carbon neutral fuel when the time comes if we determine they are still needed.
> It's interesting you mentioned nuclear subsidies when Germany poured on it's EEG renewables scheme alone more than double the cost of entire french nuclear fleet, both adjusted in today money
This is a backwards looking metric, we need to look forward based on the costs today. Are we paying 2011 solar prices or 2026 solar prices when building renewables in 2026? We pay 2026 prices.
Look at the proposed French EPR2 program. 11 cents/kWh 40 year CFD and interest free loans with the first reactor coming online in 2038.
Just an absolutely insanely large handout from tax money to force new built nuclear power into existence.
While the competition in renewables and storage are built on massive scale without subsides.
It's not tiny portion - it's a fully parallel grid. Germany as example needs to have 80GW+ of gas per Fraunhofer.
French epr2 nuclear will have smaller subsidies than german biomass. The handout of tax money for epr will be the equivalent of about 1.5-2y of german eeg now or even less in the future since it's projected to grow due to ren self cannibalization.
It's not that trivial to run gas firming on carbon neutral fuel aka biogas. First you don't have enough fuel, second- their opex will get so high due to low CF that you'll need a separate market for that and owners will be sure to ask a lot of $ for this firming to get profit and compensate no demand periods.
And we are talking only about direct subsidies. Germany will start subsidizing transmission this year tpo because their household prices are highest in EU, about 6bn/y. Most of this transmission is due to distributed ren expansion and need to avoid curtailment
That is a question for the 2030s to answer. Maybe demand response, storage and similar is enough? Either way, locking in trillions in nuclear handouts when the entire energy system will be reshaped before they are even online is by far the most stupid thing we can do today.
> French epr2 nuclear will have smaller subsidies than german biomass. The handout of tax money for epr will be the equivalent of about 1.5-2y of german eeg now or even less in the future since it's projected to grow due to ren self cannibalization.
Now you're trying to compare with the worst, because you know how outrageous the comaprison becomes when comparing with solar, wind and storage.
You do know that the EEG payments have been quickly reducing due to not needing subsidies anymore? And €20B in subsidies per reactor, which you did try to hide in "1.5-2y of eeg" is just a horrific waste of money.
> It's not that trivial to run gas firming on carbon neutral fuel aka biogas. First you don't have enough fuel, second- their opex will get so high due to low CF that you'll need a separate market for that and owners will be sure to ask a lot of $ for this firming to get profit and compensate no demand periods.
Or hydrogen, or hydrogen derivatives. Just pick whatever the maritime industry and aviation settles on as they decarbonize.
Yes. That is called "capacity markets". They already exist all around the world. Generally very cheap to run.
> And we are talking only about direct subsidies. Germany will start subsidizing transmission this year tpo because their household prices are highest in EU, about 6bn/y. Most of this transmission is due to distributed ren expansion and need to avoid curtailment
You do know that an electrified society requires 2 - 3x the grid size right? No matter the path we take we will need to massively expand the grid.
The only reason for curtailment is because Germany haven't divided the country into more markets because they expect to resolve the transmission bottlenecks in a few years.
nuclear provides for about 4-5ct/kwh if built cheap, everything included, looking at swiss data. Chinese units are built for 2.5bn/unit, so probably even cheaper than that.
But yes, china is far from what france or sweden did with nuclear per capita
The problem is that western new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents/kWh when running at 100% 24/7 without backup, transmission fees, taxes etc. based on Vogtle, HPC, FV3, Polish Ap1000s, EPR2s etc.
We can create imaginary renewable scenarios as well.
For example: "Assuming renewables and storage costs get an 80% price reduction (like you just gave nuclear power) then YY will happen".
Fla3 min profitability limit is 9ct and expected limit is about 12-14ct. And mind you 9ct scenario assumes 90%cf, while most US plants are 92-98%cf.
And that's for a totally f-up project... EPR2 isn't built yet so we don't know how it'll go per kwh, if EDF doesn't delay it for 20y it'll be in 6-10ct range, similar to Barakah built by Korea
Most of the cost in ren nowadays is transmission cost and firming cost, both don't have a big margin to shave, unlike nuclear
> Fla3 min profitability limit is 9ct and expected limit is about 12-14ct.
When assuming extremely subsidised interest rates. You can do the same for the competition to get an apples to apples comparison, but I know you don't want to do that.
> And that's for a totally f-up project... EPR2 isn't built yet so we don't know how it'll go per kwh, if EDF doesn't delay it for 20y it'll be in 6-10ct range, similar to Barakah built by Korea
The EPR2 subsidy proposal, yet to be accepted by the european commission, is 11 cents/kWh and interest free loans. Sum freely. Stop making stuff up.
> Most of the cost in ren nowadays is transmission cost and firming cost, both don't have a big margin to shave, unlike nuclear
How will you force anyone to buy that horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear electricity?
No, fla3 interest rates weren't that subsidized. It would require EC approval like the EPR2 project.
I didn't make stuff up. Profitability limit would be 6-10ct, the cfds would be above that
You don't need to force anyone to buy nuclear. People will pay for electricity. In some cases price will be more influenced by the source like nuclear if it's expensive. In other cases it'll be influenced by transmission, grid forming inverters and firming costs
SA is one of the leaders in ren deployment. Just like CA. Just like Germany. All are dwarfed by france for cheap household prices. That's because even if lcoe for ren is cheap, full system cost grows
> No, fla3 interest rates weren't that subsidized.
You have a study you've linked several times in the past arguing how cheap FV3 is based on insanely subsidized interest rates and a payoff time stretching almost into 2100 if an equivalent project was started today.
> It would require EC approval like the EPR2 project.
Much has changed since 2006.
> People will pay for electricity. In some cases price will be more influenced by the source like nuclear if it's expensive. In other cases it'll be influenced by transmission, grid forming inverters and firming costs
What do you do when the grid demand for firm power is zero? Shut down the nuclear plant?
> All are dwarfed by france for cheap household prices.
About the entire difference comes from extra fees and taxes. The wholesale day ahead prices are about equal.
That is also running on the French paid off nuclear fleet nearing EOL. How will you get the current wholesale prices with the EDF2 fleet costing 11 cents/kWh and interest free loans?
The costs doesn't dissappear simply because you hide them in the tax budget.
> That's because even if lcoe for ren is cheap, full system cost grows
You have to look at it coming from the raw incentives. You can complain all you want about "full system cost", but that only applies in an monopolized system where the consumers don't have any choice.
Consumers have choices and can pick and choose what of the monopolized system they want by implementing their own distributed renewable generation and storage.
Curious how this new design addresses the biggest safety challenge of nuclear reactors (the issue that was the root cause of the Fukushima accident and an indirect cause of Chernobyl): how do we ensure that the nuclear core temperature remains controlled during exceptional events (e.g., earthquakes, structural failures) when the reactor must shut down abruptly?
Chernobyl and Fukushima were different accidents and causes. Chernobyl was a systemic failure of the soviet system. Fukushima was a wild edge case that an earthquake and tsunami drained the coolant.
The truth is, all reactors ever built were considered safe at their time with whatever definition of safe. No one builds unsafe reactors. Yet they turned out not to be safe.
Nothing is ever perfectly safe and a lack of perfect absolute safety is not a valid objection. All sources of power have associated risks, even renewables. Wind power has 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour and solar has 0.02 [1]. Nuclear power has 0.03 deaths per terawatt hour (safer than wind), and it's worth noting that almost all of those are from Chernobyl, which was considered unsafe even at the time (they knew about the positive void coefficient). I'm not arguing that nuclear power is perfect, mainly because it isn't. But it's not like all other sources of power are idyllic havens of safety. There are always tradeoffs.
But the bottom line is that renewable costs are trending down, hard and fast, battery tech is just getting started, and development time for wind and solar is comparatively fast.
Future nuke costs at this point are speculative, development time is very slow, and even if new reactors were commissioned tomorrow, by the time they came online it's very, very likely solar and wind + storage would make them uneconomic.
IMO the attachment to nukes is completely irrational. There are obvious economic downsides, no obvious economic benefits - and that's just the money side.
Thanks for the reply! I think you're arguing with the wrong person in the second half, though. I agree that renewables could potentially be more economically viable than nuclear power[1]. My reply was disputing the "people can die from nuclear therefore we should never use nuclear" argument, not arguing about economic viability. Also I think that broadly claiming that your opposition is "completely irrational" is not a very tactical rhetorical move.
[1]: although since you're basing your claims on the speculative future state of solar technology 10 years in the future, I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to the speculative future state of nuclear power, but that's besides the point
Again I don't know why people do this framing that its either renewables or nuclear. We can and should develop and have both - they provide different energy products to the grid. Solar and storage ARE NOT viable at scale for 99.99% uptime requirements or industrial facilities that are in remote locations.
Nuclear is up against against nat gas, diesel or coal (in the rare states that still have coal power plants) for the most part for "baseload" or "firm" power.
Nuclear is by far the most advanced technology that we have ever developped on the planet at this point. Fusion is just 10 years away (every ten years) ;)
Apart from the deaths from workers falling off the roof or from wind turbine towers (though these might be the only type of deaths included in these figures):
If mining deaths are included, coal, oil, gas and uranium probably do not look favorable at all, but renewables aren't perfectly safe either: there was a bridge collapse at a copper/cobalt mine in Congo two months ago that killed 32. Solar and wind use more copper per energy unit than other technologies, and solar and wind indirectly require battery technology. Lithium batteries contain lithium and cobalt. (Lithium mining seems relative safe, but 70% of cobalt is mined in Congo, which is known for artisanal mining, and the above-mentioned accident indeed seemed to happen at such a mine.) Wind, especially off-shore wind uses more concrete and steel than other power generation technologies (hydro seems like it'd use a lot too?), which could be explored too. (Course, these metals are recyclable, so you only mine them once.)
Accidents, mainly. Solar panels and wind turbines produce far less energy per module than nuclear, so you have to build much more of them. If you build enough of something, the odds that everything goes perfect every single time are quite low.
Constrained edge cases are fine. Particularly when contrasted with coal and natural gas, which are, in practice, what everyone is competing against in America.
The edge case was predicted, but market and political forces chose to ignore it. The GE Type II reactor had known issues. [0]
I should add that I am not strictly anti-nuclear, and it is super interesting that some of the largest funders of anti-nuclear propaganda have been actors from the fossil fuel industry. [1]
One of the major reasons thats we have a climate crisis is that we knee capped Nuclear in the 80s and prevent new reactors and new technology development for 40 years. That left the only providers able to fill the gap were fossil based (oil, coal and gas) - which pumped out significant CO2.
Not surprised at all that oil and gas is still trying to protect themselves from competition.
Wild edge cases are to be expected when you do things at scale. If you build 20 buildings in different regions, at least one of them will likely face a once-in-1000-years natural disaster. And it's difficult to estimate how bad that particular kind of once-in-1000-years event can be, because you probably only have a century or two of reliable data.
Let’s not forget that you don’t have to be a socialist/communist nation to decide you want to do the cheaper thing. Without robust regulations I guarantee you a Chernobyl-like disaster could easily happen in the US because of less scrupulous companies cutting corners and choosing the cheaper path. With Chernobyl it was the government instead of a private company.
We can talk all day about how the system incentivized people playing CYA rather than actually trying to solve the problem (true and fair critiques), but when it comes down to it, this happened because the cheaper option was chosen and potential issues were overlooked. That transcends political systems.
I personally find highly hypothetical situations impossible to guarantee but I'm glad you have such a high degree of self certainty for a plausible scenario you have decided to give certain results to.
You should really consider educating yourself on the Chernobyl reactor melt down (read a book or two) to understand the level of calamity inflicted by the communist system. Stop trying to make it sound like that could happen anywhere because the pressures of capitalism could cause the same results. Its pretty eye opening how insane the chernobyl situation was.
The US had Three Mile Island. Japan had Fukushima.
One of the biggest arguments against nuclear is that reactors are insanely complex. Beyond a certain level of complexity, safety and predictability become impossible even with perfect management - which certainly doesn't exist in the nuclear industry.
This is especially true of any nuke system which needs external cooling, because stable water levels aren't a given any more because of climate change. Between floods, droughts, and storm surges, the environment is part of the system - something Fukushima discovered to its cost.
I am actually very familiar with the history of Chernobyl and the meltdown. What I’m saying is human greed and short sightedness do not suddenly go away because a nation decides on a different political/economic system. The implication that it only happened because it was the Soviet Union is what I’m taking issue with because it absolutely could happen in the US without proper guardrails. All it takes is one bad company cutting the wrong corner or firing the one person who spoke out. It’s very easy to see no society is immune to this.
I am not defending the Soviet Union or any of the decisions made during Chernobyl. So you should redirect your indignation/condescension.
The differences between soviet state and Us market based capitalism are completely different. Chernobyl didn't fail because of a simple case of human greed and short sightedness. You really haven't read the details of how Chernobyl came about - its truly wild.
While I don't disagree that there is always a risk (albeit very small) that the bean counters come in while the regulators are sleeping and risk the actual product (see: Boeing) - to try and put in a fear that the Chernobyl situation is just as possible you are reaching there.
Your underlying argument is that we shouldn't use high tech energy and enjoy its benefits because there's a chance somewhere that someone might abuse it but also, that might not happen. Its a blanket safety argument - don't do anything because theres risk.
> Chernobyl didn't fail because of a simple case of human greed and short sightedness.
You are overly reducing what I said and missing the crux of my point.
> You really haven't read the details of how Chernobyl came about - its truly wild.
I told you I have. Nothing I’ve said above discounts that and you know nothing about me. I’m not going to rattle off what I’ve read. You are being incredibly disrespectful.
> Your underlying argument is that we shouldn't use high tech energy and enjoy its benefits because there's a chance somewhere that someone might abuse it
Never said anything remotely like that at any point. And I never would, because I am not against nuclear energy. It is vastly superior to fossil fuels from a humane standpoint and for the environment.
Have a good rest of your week man. This isn’t productive. Go grind your axe elsewhere.
>What I’m saying is human greed and short sightedness do not suddenly go away because a nation decides on a different political/economic system. The implication that it only happened because it was the Soviet Union is what I’m taking issue with because it absolutely could happen in the US without proper guardrails. All it takes is one bad company cutting the wrong corner or firing the one person who spoke out. It’s very easy to see no society is immune to this.
Those are your words - they align exactly and I stand by what I said. No axe to grind here but will defend nuclear energy from weak arguments. Your line of reasoning is reductionist saying that what happened in Soviet Russia could simply happen anywhere because of corners cut in your words when in fact there have been no other nuclear meltdowns as terrible as Chernobyl since Chernobyl.
Whether you realize it or not you are making a safety argument by invoking Soviet mistakes and making them sound comparable and inevitable to the rest of the world which has had a pretty good spot record (less Fukushima and 3 mile, but those outcomes aren't comparable to Chernobyl).
You also have a great week - I hope my messaging sharpens what you are implying by your written argument.
You don't need to prevent it. You just need to prevent a catastrophe and even Fukushima did it relatively well - nobody died or will die from radiation. Current benchmark for (future) gen4 designs is having consequences limited to the area of the plant, think of 3MI but as worst case. But imo it's still an overkill, nuclear is one of the safest sources in terms of human deaths/kwh and the stat only gets better with gen3/3+
> You just need to prevent a catastrophe and even Fukushima did it relatively well - nobody died or will die from radiation.
“As of 2020, the total number of cancer and leukemia instances has risen to six cases according to the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).[5] In 2018 one worker died from lung cancer as a result from radiation exposure.”
These are small numbers compared to the number that died due to the tsunami and the massive evacuation (to avoid radiation injuries). The frustrating bit is that they could have avoided it all.
Lung cancer is hardly related to type and amount of radiation in that area. There was no medical expertise proving their cancer was caused by Fk. It was mostly done due to respect to the person that participated in the cleanup and their employees protection laws. Same with other cancers- it can very well be within normal incidence rate
"
The workers' compensation claims that have been recognized by labor authorities include six cases of workers who developed cancer or leukemia due to radiation exposure
"
So compensation has been requested for cancers, of which one death has been reported.
It’s a distant memory from my radiography training, but solid cancers generally take longer to appear post radiation exposure (compared to eg leukaemia), and that case seems early. The article claims that you can’t get lung cancer from a nuclear accident. I’m not sure why they say that, it seems a bold claim.
Whatever the case, they paid out the compensation.
There is no cancer that can be attributed to a particular radiation source. Population rates of cancer might change, but at an individual level, you can’t prove a thing.
From the perspective of the power plant, that’s lucky.
It's not about being lucky. The dose was too low to make a measurable impact. And the effects can't happen this past as we have data about impact of heavy radiation after JP bombing.
So what we have is an industry with extremely low death rate impact that some countries put a stop on, like jp in the past or banned, like Germany, all while industries that caused more deaths like coal generation or even hydro are still used. And other branhces that do vastly more damage like smoking and alcohol are legalized. To me this is sad
This may just be me... but is anyone else in their head saying: "whats the catch?"
~~Meta~~ Facebook has made their money by de-stabilizing people's emotional state to keep them engaged and buying stuff via ads. I'm having a tough time connecting the dots between that and nuclear power.
I get that and scanned the article. they are currently, and have been, working on "AI" for a bit, but strategically they aren't positioned to provide a service offering right now. Even if they are going all in and they got regulatory love, it would make way more sense to go after an energy source/provider that could provide it on a faster timeframe. they'll get their energy in what? 7-10 years?
Meta (seemingly) bought the local race track in Beaver PA for a large data center. We were sad to see a world class racing facility go away as it finally started to hit its stride. But the offer was too hard for ownership to pass up
Racetrack memory is an emerging alternative that might obviate the current DRAM shortage especially for datacenter use, so in a way this makes a whole lot of sense.
After reading through all press releases I still haven't seen any details on any money changing hands?
The previous ones from Google and Amazon at least specified that it was based on PPAs. Where all they did was bind themselves to buy X amount of power at Y cost if the company could deliver.
Taking a step back I have an incredibly hard time seeing how new built nuclear power will cope with renewables fundamentally reshaping our grids.
We're seeing the unraveling of the grid monopoly infront of our eyes [1] and renewables are set to completely crash all "baseload" markets. [2] Likely forcing them to become stranded assets.
I'm kind of surprised there's so many nuclear power companies. I remember Google signed a deal a year or so ago [0] with a different one (Kairos). I wonder why they're not in this deal? Is it all connections and funny money? Or do any of these have real shots at making something useful?
I was thinking how the dotcom bust left a lot of dark fiber infrastructure which helped the internet take off after that. It would be great if the upcoming AI bust (if it happens) leaves a bunch of power generation and new nuclear tech behind.
The dark fiber analogy doesn't quite work though, because unused fiber just sits there harmlessly. Nuclear plants have massive decommissioning costs ($280M-600M+ per plant), ongoing waste storage requirements, and if the companies go bust, taxpayers are likely on the hook. The EU alone is underfunded by €118 billion on decommissioning. Meanwhile batteries and solar keep getting cheaper every year without the “who pays to clean this up in 50 years” problem. Seems like a very roundabout way to hope for public benefit.
with small companies it's like with startups - some might fail so maybe it's better to have more players. I still think this is strange - if they wanted nuclear - could have approached GE for some BWRX of ABWR or W-house & KHNP for some nice AP1000/alike units
Right. Meta wants big enough plants that an AP1000 or two would be the right size. They're known to work. There are four in operation, two in the US, and another dozen or so under construction.
Most of the small nuclear reactor startups hand-wave the failure modes and argue that they don't need the hulking big expensive containment building. NuScale claimed that.
They wanted multiple reactors sharing the same cooling pool. If they ever had a leak, the whole set of reactors would be contaminated, even without a meltdown.
If we look at the big reactor accidents so far, there's Chernobyl, with no containment building. There's Fukushima, with too small a containment unable to contain the pressure. And there's Three Mile Island, where a large, strong containment building contained a meltdown. Three Mile Island was an expensive disaster, but not hazardous outside the plant. That's the failure mode you want.
We might be better off at developing better techniques for welding thick sections to make hulking big, strong containment vessels. There's been progress with robotic welding of thick sections.[1]
> surprised there's so many nuclear power companies
This is actually American capitalism working at its finest.
Have you seen a video of a slime mold "solving" a maze? It reaches out in every direction with thin tendrils until it makes contact. (Then the game shifts.)
We have a sense, like a slime mold picking up on the "scent" of food, that there is energy. But there are lots of good hypotheses for how we get there. So we try them. Not exhaustively. But multiply. When someone demonstrates they've got it, the game will shift to consolidation and scaling.
I won’t take Meta’s new ambitions serious unless Zuckerberg does something like have a “fireside chat” next to Ezra Klein moderated by Kara Swisher where he awkwardly spams the word “abundance” while staring Klein square in the brow. And then buys Vox Media.
This is to appease the current US administration running the federal government that for some odd reasons is abhorrent to the idea of using cheap, cleaner renewable energy and battery storage to decarbonize our air and grid.
I remember when terrapower was supposed to build a kind of reactor which would use depleted/unenriched uranium which was basically a hole in the ground slowly burning up, but now it seems they're doing a molten sodium "classic" reactor, is that the same thing and I am confused, or did they change their strategy?
As technology improves, we have less and less need for nuclear. The continent with the greatest need for nuclear is Europe, and these German grid modelers have taken a look at the EU grid with the latest data and decided that additional baseload generation (like nuclear) is not required and will likely increase costs if built:
In addition to the other corrections here, I'd like to add one more remarkable fact: in 2025 the share of German electricity generated by solar increased to 18% from 14%. That's in a single year, in a country with terribly low levels of sun! Nuclear generated 5% of electricity before it was shut down, and had generated that same percentage for more than a decade (that's as far back as the chart I saw went).
It's remarkably easy to scale solar to very large amounts in short time periods. Far easier than building a new nuclear fleet.
A core assumption of capitalism is that when individuals act in their own self-interest, their actions tend to produce outcomes that are beneficial for society as a whole. This seems like a compelling piece of evidence!
I think that's, generally speaking, not true, as evidenced by the fact that climate change is still happening almost entirely due to selfish motivations of oil companies and bribed politicians.
Yet, globally, the world is moving towards renewables regardless of big-oil interests. I don't think even the most hard core activists are expecting to close everything coal, gas and oil related overnight, so we need to wait until the energy transformation is finished. It won't be led by the US, Russia and the Middle-East, that's for sure, but it will happen.
Even if that's true, we're already facing negative consequences from climate change, and it's affecting developing countries the most. The oil companies knew about the risk of climate change in the 70's, and actively suppressed it and pushed pro-petroleum narratives instead.
Certainly the selfish greedy ambitions of corrupt politicians and short-sighted corporations aren't good for the people dying and being displaced. I mean, we can play with numbers and try and argue a "greater good", sure, but it does seem a little convenient that we can act like greedy self-interests are helping everyone when there are current victims.
I think the idea behind that concept is not that it's true. The idea is we will never change human self-interest and greed. So we build systems where even with that as the primary motivation, it still has more important secondary effects that probably benefit us.
And I'm saying that that hasn't historically been the case.
There are plenty of quarries that effectively condemned land that destroyed entire ecosystems because of greedy mineral companies. Pretty much anyone using this forum is using a product that was produced by unethical and/or child labor. We're already seeing negative effects from climate change, effecting many, many people, mostly in poor countries, and it's likely to get worse before it gets better.
You could argue that these systems benefit some people; I certainly benefit from having cheap electronics, but of course you can always cherry pick good examples from pretty much anything. This is with the current system that we built.
Now sure, there might be some hypothetical system that maybe fixes these problems, but due to the use of the word "evidence" in the comment I was responding to I didn't think we were talking political theory.
What kind of logic is that? It reminds me some people I know that vote to extreme-right parties because "well, we know that the regular parties are not gonna change anything. These new guys may do something new. Who knows, let's vote them and find out"
Well, no, I think that the claim is that having nuclear power plants is better than not having them. If they're not sucking energy off the grid (like what is happening right now), that at least will help avoid regular people like us having to pay the increased prices and indirectly subsidizing them.
And nuclear energy is clean (from a climate change perspective at least), and so if they're going to keep spending huge amounts of energy AI training anyway, it's probably better to do that in a way that isn't going to keep boiling the planet.
Also, if there is any kind of excess energy then it can be fed back into the grid, meaning that grid power can be fed from something relatively clean compared to something dirty (like coal).
I'm not entirely sure how this relates to the party thing. I'm saying that sometimes something selfish in a capitalistic system can occasionally still be a net good. I didn't think that was controversial. I'm not saying we give Zuckerberg a trophy or anything.
The biggest barrier to nuclear energy in our country is the linear no-threshold safety model. We know the model is wrong, opens up operators to infinite liability, and since adopting it the nuclear industry has effectively been dead.
Even just a basic common sense threshold would make nuclear more viable overnight.
Agreed, but I don't think that dumping ALARA will fix nuclear cost. There's still plenty of stuff in a nuclear reactor hot enough that we have to worry about keeping it from being inadvertently released.
This is a purely political move. It will take a decade or longer if ever to ever get power from this. And yes it says "as early as 2032" but we know how that goes.
Why nuclear? Because it's cleaner than fossil fuelds but appeases the administration because it isn't wind or solar, which would immediately solve any power generation problems.
You might be tempted to say, since this always comes up, "what about base load?"
FFirst, batteries can solve that problem.
Second, you use a mix of power and when the Sun isn't out (ie night) is when power is cheaper from other sources.
Third, data centers don't really need base power at all. You just run the DC when you have power and don't when you don't. There's precedent for this. Google has a DC in Scandanavia that they shut down a few days a year when it gets too hot, otherwise it's just cooled by ocean water.
What I find most funny about all this is that all these big tech companies are kowtowing to the state in the exact same way they accuse Chinese companies of doing.
wind and solar need firming. Currently firming capacity in US is getting scarce. It can be fixed a bit with better transmission but otherwise you need to expand it. China is expanding firm power with coal, gas and nuclear. Germany will expand gas.
Bess will not solve the firming problem. And no, if you build a multibillion datacenter you want to run it around the clock as much as possible. But yes, some datacenters don't have such requirements, but here we are talking about meta
Yes. Vistra is the largest power generator in the US [1]. Most of the deal that Meta announced is with Vistra, and the power will come from some existing facilities.
"Infrastructure investment" is not fungible. There's either demand for this power where they're adding it, or there's not. If there is demand, then it's created by AI. If there's not (i.e. AI bubble pops), then there's excess capacity where we don't need it.
I think the arguments for this would possibly be, if AI continues to be useful (generation demand skyrockets): Meta would possibly have a positive ROI for these investments which would lead to others copying the investment strategy and building more nuclear. If that happens a large portion of AI demand would become green(-ish) energy.
If AI demand lowers (generation demand plummets): Meta would have subsidized a bunch of nuclear reactors which would likely continue to produce power for 10 years - 50 years.
A big reason I have heard for lack of nuclear build out is the lack of starting capital but after they are built they are generally stable and maintenance is predictable.
> A big reason I have heard for lack of nuclear build out is the lack of starting capital but after they are built they are generally stable and maintenance is predictable.
I have also heard this, but given Meta's announcement is mostly in funding and extending the useful lifespan, doesn't that indicate without an infusion of capital, the ongoing operations are not cost effective?
I'm glad that individuals with no democratic control are allowed to declare large swaths of society to suffering because, maybe, in the future things might get better.
FWIW, it took nearly 150 years for commoners to benefit from the industrial revolution. The idea that I must suffer and my children must suffer and their children must suffer so some future plutocrat can get a fatter nut is pathetic.
I mean, we could just give up and go back into the swamps that we crawled out off millions of years ago. But I'd rather have more clean power come online. Energy is EVERYTHING.
"Fallout risk" and "dangerous waste risk" are such non-issues that have been so absurdly elevated in the public perception that the fear of them has caused far more deaths than the risks themselves.
How exactly? Meta isn’t doing this out of generosity to society. They’ll be consuming this and vastly more energy to ultimately increase their own profits?
While I'm sure that the vast majority of this energy is going straight to AI server farms, I'm also hopeful that this will renew efforts to switch to sustainable energy sources.
The entire world is switching to sustainable energy at a tremendous rate because they are the cheapest source of electricity, and storage is economical on every grid's peak price to low price swing that I have seen. In places like Pakistan solar is taking over because the grid made really poor investments in very expensive fossil fuels. In Africa, a panel and a battery is cheaper to run than a generator, which is life changing. As that scales up it will revolutionize entire economies.
In the US, the vast majority of new generation is renewables, matched with a ton of storage. There's some gas too, but it will be uneconomical to run these gas plants before their end of life:
The biggest impediment to cheap sustainable electricity is political and basic ignorance of the voting public that allows utilities to continue installing familiar, but more expensive fossil generation.
what has home solar to do with country's grid and industrial needs? No country has a VRE+BESS solution to fully sustain itself. South Australia might get close having extremely nice weather patterns but even they will periodically import from fossils neighbors.
Nuclear was dirt cheap in US but it didn't help to expand it. and now it's not that cheap since supply chain is gone
> what has home solar to do with country's grid and industrial needs?
Why are you asking this question without answering it? Unless you're assuming I said something I don't, I don't understand the relevance here.
> No country has a VRE+BESS solution to fully sustain itself.
A couple of fallacies here: non existence yet doesn't mean it's not possible, especially for a grid with equipment lifetimes measured in multiple decades. Once it makes sense to build a VRE only grid it will take several decades for it to happen.
> Nuclear was dirt cheap in US but it didn't help to expand it. and now it's not that cheap since supply chain is gone
Nuclear was completely overbuilt, based on bad over predictions for energy demand, leading to excess orders, then the only plants still being under construction being the ones that were poorly managed, leaving a distinctly bad financial taste in the utilities' mouths. They had to be bribed by state legislatures in South Carolina and Georgia to let them pre-bill ratepayers and also put ratepayers on the hook for overages on construction for new reactors, which everyone expected and which happened disastrously.
It's really unclear that nuclear is ever going to be cheap when its main costs are high skilled construction labor, concert and steel. None of those inputs are getting cheaper and the only chance at making logistics and management better seem to be small modular reactors, which are inherently cost inefficient due to losing the scale advantages of 1GW reactors.
It's no longer 1970, and the costs and technology of the modern economy are fundamentally doffeeent. We have learned so much, and I hope that we have learned tha nuclear doesn't fit with our advanced technology of the 21st century.
Biggest cost factors for current nuclear isn't steel, nor labor. It's interest, especially when the project takes 20y instead pf 4-6/unit with several built in parallel
The cost of interest depends both on cost of materials and duration. A plant that takes 20y to build will cost much more vs a plant that's done in 6y. If we relearn to build fast(er) nuclear will get cheap enough to get a place on the grid
I would be very skeptical about Meta on top of running any reactor. Move fast and break things doesn't work out well in that area of business. Why don't they invest money into more renewables instead, to power their data centers? That seems a safer bet and choice.
I despise Facebook and all that it stands for, but if the surplus value that it has extracted from humanity over the last two decades is reinvested intelligently into nuclear energy, I'm actually okay with it.
Despite the hype that you see on Twitter, the hard tech startup scene is actually incapable of large-scale engineering coordination on the level needed for a nuclear power plant, or even a gas turbine.
If any innovation on fission reactors is going to be successfully commercialized, we will need to see billions of dollars of investment over medium to long time horizons.
Of course, the millstone around the neck of nuclear power is that it's a dual-use technology. There's probably a lot more behind the scenes that's been done to stifle the industry effectively for non-proliferation reasons, but masquerading as cost, regulatory problems, environmental concerns, etc.
I am pro-nuclear power, but I miss the days when companies would, you know, return their profits to investors, so those investors could then invest in other companies doing different things, instead of all corporations tending towards generic everything-investment vehicles.
This is partly due to tax policy. Investors don't want this. Distributing dividends is less efficient capital distribution because those capital gains are immediately taxed rather than be deferred into a higher share price with no tax drag.
This is why every tech company does buybacks(other than meta which started a dividend when Mark got sick of high interest rates on his debt, they still mainly do buybacks though)
It'll either work well, and then that's what'll happen, hooray, or it won't work well, and competition will allow businesses to differentiate. Just make sure you're not voting for the people who disable competition if you're worried.
Are all these techbros drunk with power? The other day it was cloudflare guy trying to play international politics, now Zuck wants to get into nuclear.
So now we’re harnessing a the dicy and capital intensive power of the atom to create the illusion of speaking to people because we can no longer strike up a conversation with a stranger on the street. Cool, cool. Personally I’m going to stick to real people with no divergent neutron chain-reactions involved.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff for nuclear. I wrote to the government to get them to remove 10 CFR Part 20 Subpart E financial requirements but obviously that hasn't happened. You can start from there and branch out.
Don't think so but after seeing electricity prices rise and even double in areas by giant data centers many areas are requiring them to provide their own power
Most of the cost of residential electricity is the distribution network, not generation. Supply/demand dynamics only really come into play during extreme scenarios like the Texas winter outage a few years ago.
The price isn’t the same, it’s more expensive, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. This particular project is slated to take a decade — the last nuclear reactor that the US built was also slated to take a decade. It just opened in 2024, and was approved for construction in 2009. This is a long-view solution to a right-now problem.
We should have been keeping up with this infrastructure stuff all along… but I’m really not convinced all of these companies are going to be using this shit in 5 years, anyway.
How big are the commitments here? I’m having trouble finding actual dollar amounts. Does this actually represent an infusion of money into these SMR efforts, or are these “commitments” tied to so many missable targets that it’s actually meaningless?
Oklo in particular seems to be total vaporware, I can’t find a single technical picture anywhere of anything this company’s reactor is seeking to do. They seem to raise money based on a rendering of a ski lodge.
A huge, concrete investment in TerraPower would be more interesting, but as a molten salt SMR which has never been built, this also looks extremely non-committal.
SMRs in general seem like a dead end, we’ve heard about them for decades and they don’t seem to be any closer to making nuclear power buildouts less expensive.
Everything that makes proven nuclear power plant design expensive seems to revolve around the same drivers of expense for all long-term construction: large up front capital requirements, changing regulations, failure to predict setbacks, and pervasive lawsuits. SMRs purport to tackle a couple of these (shorter-term builds, fewer setbacks), at the cost of considerable efficiency, but so far this seems like an inferior alternative to “just get better at building proven nuclear plant designs”.
The thing which can make nuclear cheap is building a large number of the same plant design.
China are building dozens simultaneously, and even with their questionable workers rights, safety and environmental practices, they cost $7 Billion a pop.
A dozen $7B nuclear plants is $84B, which is incidentally almost exactly the estimated cost of the SF-Gilroy-Palmdale plan for California's high speed rail. If you count all of phase 1, the P50 estimated cost goes up to $106B. That's the equivalent of 15 nuclear plants.
China has over 28 plants in progress, which should provide a total of >32GW of capacity when they're completed. That's 32×24×365= 280TWh of electricity per year. California's total electric grid in 2024 produced 216TWh.
Which is to say, $7B is a huge sum. But as far as infrastructure goes, China is currently building 130% of all of California's generation capacity that'll be complete within a decade or so, for much less than double the estimates for a high speed rail system that'll serve almost nobody by 2038.
$7B is a lot of money. But it's actually a very reasonable amount of money because the projects are actually happening. 28 $7B projects in the US are actually probably closer to a trillion dollars in investment for far less net public good over five times the timeline.
I agree, but if a developed country could get the price down to $15 billion a pop in the next two decades it would be a miracle.
Not to mention you wouldn’t generate a single kW for 20+ years from today.
In theory they’re fantastic. In reality not so much (which, incidentally, is the same story for the CA HSr)
In April Reuters reported that China approved ten plants for $27B (total):
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Whether they run over budget (or whether this is an under inflated figure) is yet to be seen, but it would seem that China is bringing the cost down, and substantially.
I'm not a nuclear expert by any means, but from the reading I've done, they're largely designing and building the reactors themselves these days. And it seems that to help keep the cost low (among other reasons), they're also helping other countries build them.
There was a recent study from Chain where they assess their own 4th generation Nuclear Reactor programme as being at least 10 - 15 years ahead of the west, and specifically said even that number is conservative estimate.
I wouldn't be surprised if they accelerate their time line and building target.
Yes, China have a good shot at doing it because they are building 33 simultaneously now and they have questionable workers rights and environmental policies.
As I said, if a developed country can do half what they’re doing (ie twice the price and double the construction time) in the next 20 years it would be a miracle.
It's not really a fair comparison though, is it? Is a questionable environmental policy worse than a bad electric grid? America has a dirty grid that has fairly limited capacity. How many fossil fuels will we burn (producing electricity, and powering non-EVs) because we aren't building nuclear? The environmental benefits of having nuclear power probably largely make up the difference (if they don't exceed it), and that's over the time scale of a century or more where we'll need to catch up.
Workers rights I have no real knowledge on. But China isn't known for their track record on any kind of rights, and arguably US blue collar workers have a pretty awful quality of life that the government largely doesn't take the blame for (because we don't have state-run healthcare and minimum wage doesn't keep up with the cost of living). China has forced labor, America has legalized slavery in the prison system. Plenty of American industries rely on the unethical use of migrant labor while the state disappears those same people to "alligator alcatraz" or overseas prisons. I don't know the full extent of how bad things are in China for the kinds of workers who build these plants but I am hesitant to overlook how bad things are in the US.
It's also a country that doesn't seem to care if the project is not cost-effective from the PoV of western companies. This is always a salient point missing from most conversation about the US and by extension the Western world; the advocacy of cheap energy are hiding the argument that nuclear power is both more consistent in power delivery and cleaner (arguable with the nuclear waste ofc) than any alternative currently available.
Very insightful, this helped put things into perspective.
Remember those systems are non-intermittent and have lifespans of 50 years or more. Server farms are not amenable to load shifting, they expect round the clock power. Trying to power them with intermittent sources would need very hefty power banks.
If this nuclear plant has 2 GW of power output, were talking about 2.4 billion dollars to store 12 hours worth of the plant's output assuming $100 per KWh of storage.
Your numbers are off. Korea + China ~ 2500 $/kw, USA ~ 6-9000 $/kw. ` GW ~ $2.5B. A large portion of that is dealing with archaic regulations and very long timelines. Important to have regulations that are functional protect the public but also don't inhibit industries growth (which were the design of Nuclear regulations in the 80s).
Nuclear is never getting cheap [1]. Nuclear reactors need to be large to scale [2]. As for why SMR persists? Because someone makes money selling the idea. That's it.
And SMRs get sold is the very idea you state because it sounds compelling: the more you build, the cheaper it gets.
Nuclear seems like it should work. But there are massive unsolved problems like the waste from fuel processing, processing the spent fuel, who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents. Despite there being <700 nuclear reactors built we've had multiple catastrophic failures. Chernobyl still has a 1000 square mile absolute exclusion zone. Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
Yet this all gets hand-waved away. Renewable is the future.
[1]: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/csiro-confirms-n...
[2]: https://spitfireresearch.com/scaling-example-1-small-modular...
> who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents.
I personally trust the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I also trust the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the regulatory bodies in the UK and the EU.
Why?
The failure modes are not binary. A reactor is not just operating fine or going boom. There are multiple small failures that can happen, and you can get an idea if a country's nuclear fleet is run with safety in mind or not.
Chernobyl happened during a safety exercise, an exercise that was attempted 3 times before and failed 3 times before. In principle the plant should not even have been allowed to operate until the exercise had been completed. The exercise was supposed to demonstrate if in case of reactor emergency shut-down the cooling water can be kept circulating in the core for one minute, the amount of time it took for the Diesel generators to ramp up power; it was an essential exercise to perform before starting full power operations. The fact that the plant was allowed to operate for 3 years without completing this exercise - no, actually, while failing this exercise multiple times, tells you a lot about the safety mentality of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union.
In the US, the NRC performs a lot of monitoring, and the results are published. For example, here's [1] a dashboard of performance indicators. There are 17, such as: Unplanned Scrams per 7000 Critical Hours, Unplanned Power Changes, Residual Heat Removal System, Reactor Coolant System Leak, etc. Out of about 100 reactors, you can see only green, with the exception of one yellow; that yellow is for the Palisades plant that is not currently operating, it is in the process of restarting operations, and I am sure it will not be allowed to restart until all the performance indicators are green.
[1]https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/oversight/pi-summary
I more or less agree with your comment but feel it should be pointed out the CSIRO economic feasibility study is specific to Australia.
The arguments made there; why Australia is better to pursue renewables now rather than hope for nuclear eventually have no bearing on, say, China's use of nuclear for 20% of Chinese baseload.
A large part of the CSIRO argument is the greenfield standing start no prior expertise massive upfront costs and long lead time to any possible return.
China, by contrast, has an existing small army of nuclear technologists, multiple already running reactors, and many reactors of varying designs already in the design and construction pipeline.
Even China who committed to significant nuclear capacity and wanted to ramp up their nuclear percentage to 20% (IIRC) is slowly moving away. The percentage of nuclear has in fact reduced over the last 5 years and initial commitments/projections of nuclear capacity are likely not going to be med. The whole reason being that solar (and to a lesser degree wind) have become so cheap that nuclear just doesn't make economical sense even for China.
You say that and yet China is still building new reactors and have staged plans for more.
China is a special case. In fact, it's the one country on Earth I'd actually trust to build, maintain and regulate nuclear power.
I don't believe China is convinced (yet) of the long-term viability of nuclear power (fission or fusion) but, like with many things, they're hedging their bets. In the US? It's just another opportunity to transfer wealth from the government coffers to private hands through a series of cost overruns, massive delays and under-deliveries.
China's advantages here are extreme. They have the manufacturing base, would likely use the same plant designs in multiple places (rather than a separate procurement process in every city or province) and they have a bunch of existing infrastructure that gives them options, like they're pioneers in UHVDC transmission lines that might make it more viable to build a nuclear reactor away from populated centers. Even UHVDC development was to solve a largely China-only problem: the power generation is mostly in the west part of the country whereas the people are in the east.
And yes the CSIRO report is Australia-specific but the timeframes for building nuclear power in the US are similar: 10-15 years. Starting today it's unclear if such a plant would be online by 2040. Yet we can build solar in months.
That's the other part of this: if we're just looking at data centers, theyh can be placed anywhere. You can ignore where fiber runs. You just build more fiber if you have to. DCs need power and water, basically. The Southwest is very efficient for solar [1] but light on for water. There's the Colorado River but that's been tapped beyond its limits already.
Along the Mississippi is another option. Not as efficient as the Southwest for solar but water is plentiful. Inclement weather is an issue though, both tornadoes and the winters.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7fk7eu/solar_power...
> And yes the CSIRO report is Australia-specific but the timeframes for building nuclear power in the US are similar
* The US has existing commercial scale nuclear power stations. Australia does not.
* The US has an existing nuclear weapons industry. Australia does not.
* The US has existing advanced courses on nuclear technology for workforce scale populations. Australia has extremely limited coursework.
* The US actively builds and maintains SMRs for submarine use. Australia does not.
These are fairly critical differences in terms of additional costs to Australia above and beyond build times.
- Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely
- Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
- Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
- Multiple catastrophic failures: sounds bad until you realize that you can name only two:
1. Chernobyl: old flawed reactor design, basically impossible today, a few unfortunate deaths among first responders in the cleanup, that's it
2. Fukushima: no radiation deaths. You would get a higher dose of radiation flying to Japan to visit Fukushima than from drinking the irradiated leaked water there.
> upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
Where are you getting this number? According to https://cnic.jp/english/?p=6193 it was estimated at JPY 21.5 trillion (roughly USD 150 to 190 billion).
> Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely
This is simply untrue. Depending on the type and enrichment of the fuel it will need to be actively cooled for some period, possibly decades. After that you can bury it. You need facilities for all of this. You need personnel (done by the NRC currently) to transport and install new fuel, remove old fuel and transport it to suitable sites as well as manage those sites. Before they even make it to storage sites they'll typically be stored onsite or in the reactor for years.
> Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
Given the current administration, almost nobody. The state of drinking water in places like Flint, MI is a national disagrace. The continued existence of lead pipes that leech lead into drinking water in many places is a national disgrace. The current administration gutting the EPA and engineering the Supreme Court to overturn things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are just the cherry on top.
A significant ramp up of nuclear power would necessitate a commensurate ramp up of the NRC in all these capacities.
> Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
Like I said, hand waved away.
> Where are you getting this number?
Multiple sources [1][2]. Fukushima requires constantly pumping water to cool the core. That water needs to be stored (in thousands of tanks onsite) then processed and ultimately released back into the ocean, which itself is controversial. Removing the core requires inventing a bunch of technologies that don't exist yet. The decomissioning process itself is something most of us won't live to see the end of [3].
The $1 trillion and a century for 1 nuclear plant. Pro-nuclear people will point to the death figure because it suits their argument. It's economically devastated that region however.
And as for Chernobyl, billions of euros was spent building a sarcophagus for the plant, only to have the integrity of that shield destroyed by a Russian drone.
[1]: https://archive.ph/EBhF7
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
[3]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fukushima
> for 1 nuclear plant
Yes, because others were mostly not affected by the Fukushima disaster despite being in the impact area. Why? Because they took safety precautions. Onagawa was closer to the epicentre, but they built on a high embankment and did not flood and lose power.
Anti-nuclear people conveniently ignore, because it suits their argument, that Japan is restarting their nuclear energy program. They finally understood that there's no other viable option for energy security, price, and achieving decarbonization goals.
The issue with spent fuel has to do with the long term (essentially permanent) storage part and is purely political. It's a solved problem except for getting approval for the solution.
The other fuel issues you mention are already dealt with today as a matter of course. It's just the final part that remains up in the air.
You are the one hand waving about failure modes. As with aircraft, as failures have happened we've learned from them. New designs aren't vulnerable to the same things old ones were. All the mishaps have happened with old designs.
Personally I think the anti-nuclear FUD that the climate activists push is unfortunate. We would likely have been close to carbon neutral by now if we'd started building it out in the late 90s.
That said, I'm inclined to agree that solar might be a better option at this point in environments that are suited to it. The batteries still aren't entirely solved but seem to be getting close. In particular, the research into seasonal storage using iron ore looks quite promising to me.
> Multiple sources [1][2].
Where does [1] say USD 1 trillion?
[2] says:
> The combination has had a toll on Japanese automotive (and other) exports. Barring Fukushima’s impacts, one would assume a return to pre-2008 fiscal meltdown exports by now. But basically they’re static. That’s in the range of $200 billion in lost exports just for the automotive industry. > > It’s likely fair to attribute $20 to $50 billion of that to irrational fear of radiation.
Like, are you serious? This is the most bizarro accounting I've ever seen.
> ...that’s about $100 billion in extra fuel costs.
And now it's counting as part of the cost of Fukushima the fossil fuels needed to replace it. Even more wacky accounting.
> another $22 billion for unexpected health costs due to burning extra fossil fuels.
It continues to get even more wacky, if that was possible, by attributing this cost to the Fukushima disaster. These are costs that would be avoided with a strong nuclear electricity generation program! These are arguments in favour of nuclear! It's not cost-effective for Japan to cover their land mass and offshore areas with solar and wind arrays! They have regular earthquakes and typhoons which would knock these vast arrays offline and take massive amounts of time and money to get back online!
You said: 'Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.' The sources you provide don't provide the numbers or, if they do, they include bogus numbers that actually make the case for nuclear.
They should focus research on thorium reactors as they are supposedly cleaner than what we have today, and afaik you can actually use the fuel waste again and again, so it drastically reduces the problem of nuclear waste and what to do with it.
The promise of thorium is that it requires external energy to be added to maintain the reaction. The theory is that it is safer because of this as it's far less likely that you get a runaway or out-of-control reaction.
The reality is more complex [1].
Molten salt reactors are another active area of research but they have been for decades as well.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IqcRl849R0&t=1652s
> But there are massive unsolved problems like the waste from fuel processing, processing the spent fuel, who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents. Despite there being <700 nuclear reactors built we've had multiple catastrophic failures. Chernobyl still has a 1000 square mile absolute exclusion zone. Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
sigh same low-tier non-issues brought up over and over again by people with no idea what they're talking about.
Look up some hard data before you speak.
- A nuclear reactor produces a tiny amount of waste per unit of power generated and it's all solid. Most sites just store it on-site because why not? Containment of small amounts of solid waste is as big of a non-issue as can be, obviously.
You realize our current energy generation revolves around burning up coal and gas and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere right? Right? And that those waste products include radioactive materials that you're so fake worried about?
You're out of your mind, completely gone in terms of what's actually happening right now vs what you're worried about. Detached from reality.
- Who can be trusted? We've had nuclear reactors for 50+ years, so... the same people that are already doing all that? What sort of a question is this? You're asking how to do something we're already doing.
- As for accidents, again, look up any data in existence. Nuclear is the safest energy production method by far, and yes, it's safer than e.g. solar. The fact that all you can point to are two accidents that have barely cost any lives at all proves that.
The very tsunami that caused Fukushima in the first place claimed 20 000 lives and all you can speak in regards to the plant is economic damage. Laughable.
You're displaying insane levels of ignorance. Look up data before you speak. Even consulting an LLM would have been better than just making stuff up.
[1]: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
Cheap-er, not cheap. They’re still fundamentally massive complicated constructions. They will never be as amenable to mass production cost reductions as things like solar and battery
>Cheap-er, not cheap.
Can we please not have these "slightly improved language" comments? You're arguing against something I didn't say and making a meaningless nitpick on word choice.
you literally said "cheap" and the comment said "cheap-er not cheap". I think the comment is correct and you are wrong. China is building the same design again and again and again. And it's still not cheap.
i'm sorry it came across that way. let me rephrase.
"cheap" to me implies it is affordable in a relative sense, compared to other options. It will almost certainly never be cheap - even if we make it cheaper through more production, it is going to remain in the group of the least affordable power generation technologies.
tbh i don't think either the original or improved language post is presenting effectively because they both just give a conclusion without any nuance, explanation or support. "cheap" cheaper who cares? $/kwh matter. transmission costs matter.
Who doesn't say nuclear is more expensive?
The lowest LCOE for nuclear is to the right of the most expensive solar plus storage.
If you have credible figures then present them with citations. Otherwise you're just hand waving.
I don't think anyone will dispute that the initial build out for solar is far far cheaper. That much is self evident to everyone. The devil is in the rest of the details.
No.
>I don't think anyone will dispute that the initial build out for solar is far far cheaper.
OK.
>The devil is in the rest of the details.
Now, this is "hand wavy" instead of answering my question and pointing to sources who support the up thread claim that nuclear will be "cheap" v. alternatives.
Do you have an LCOE study showing nuclear as "cheap"?
Okla really seems like a meme stock. Their original design was rejected by the NRC, so they are very far from ever breaking ground. I don’t understand why their valuation is so high. Why not just take all this money and build an existing, approved design?
I will be very surprised if Oklo makes it. Insiders have been selling a fair bit over the last couple years because my speculative guess is they know that they cant possible meet the expectations in the market for their product.
They essentially got a ton of traction because Altman was on the board (but since left) but most (not all) tech people don’t understand deep energy problems.
Basically it sounds like what happens in failed countries:
> “It’s not like the NRC asks for an extraordinary amount of information,” said a former nuclear official who was involved in reviewing Oklo’s failed application and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their work in the industry. “The NRC asks three questions: What is the worst that can happen, what are the systems, structures and components in your reactor that prevents that from happening, and how do you know that?”
>“Oklo would only answer them at a very high level,” the person said. “They wanted to say nothing bad can happen to our reactor.”
>DeWitte said Oklo had planned a robust public rebuttal but claims that at the time, NRC officials “threatened us, in a retributional way, not to issue a response letter to correct the record.”
>“Well, they’re gone now,” he added.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/26/nuclear-e...
> “It’s not like the NRC asks for an extraordinary amount of information,” said a former nuclear official who was involved in reviewing Oklo’s failed application and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their work in the industry. “The NRC asks three questions: What is the worst that can happen, what are the systems, structures and components in your reactor that prevents that from happening, and how do you know that?”
This...does not square with the successful hamstringing of the nuclear energy industry by regulation over the past several decades.
Are you saying that the NRC asks for more than that? That there was a different process in the past? The big complaint I've heard about the NRC are changes required mid-construction, which happened last in the 1980s.
In the 2000s the NRC adopted a new licensing scheme at industry urging. What "hamstringing" are you talking about?
Okla would sound a lot more reliable here if they would have fought back with lawsuits with their accusations, or if the would release the communication now that there's no chance of this supposed retribution. As it is Okla makes all the talk of "hamstringing" seem like people not doing their jobs and trying to blame others.
Without speaking to Okla specifically--I think it's completely reasonable (if not accurate or charitable) to assume they're avoiding as much compliance as possible--the simple fact is that, under the watch of the NRC, there have been a tiny number of licenses issued.
From the horse's mouth in 2012, only 3 (*3!*) such licenses had been granted in 30 years ( https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=5250# ).
If your agency's job is to regulate something and you've done it so successfully that barely anybody has actually gotten a license--all while complaining about compliance costs--maybe you're the problem.
Had the fellow said "Oh, we have a really high bar for safety and compliance, and not everybody's able to handle that", it'd be fine. But, acting like "oh golly gee we're so easy to work with we don't ask for much" is brazen horseshit.
The data doesn't fit for NRC being the problem. Hell look at the Summer reactor that was approved alongside Vogtle in Georgia: construction failure, billions wasted, and none of it to do with the NRC.
Or any the other many many other reactors abandoned at various states of development:
http://www.powermag.com/blog/nuclear-renaissance-recalls-pas...
There's an argument that the NRC could do things better, but placing all the well documented failures in the nuclear construction industry on the NRC doesn't make sense. Who are going to believe, the people who are always late and over budget, or the bystanders in the industry that have watched it all play out?
It is TWICE as expensive to install a megawatt of nuclear reactor on US soil than it is to put a megawatt of nuclear power into a US Aircraft Carrier.
Why?
The US Navy doesn't have to go through the NRC.
I'd like to see the source of your cost numbers, I've never seen a $/MW from the Navy's subs' and carriers' reactors that was defensible, even Construction Physics didn't want to come up with a $/MW number in their discussion [0]
But remember that with the Seawolf classes the cost was astronomically higher than in the Virginia submarine; high costs are very possible without the NRC and are frequent, and an excellent counterexample to show the underlying fallacy behind the "NRC must be reason costs are high" argument. And remember that the Navy can use highly-enriched fuel that we don't allow in civilian reactors, and that the military nuclear labor force usually gets the best and the brightest and that the civilian nuclear work force gets the leftovers.
The NRC could be the source of high cost, but if so there should be two clear pieces of evidence to show that: 1) clear examples of the NRC doing something to drive up costs, and 2) some example of what to do instead of the NRC, or differences with other regulatory schemes that we could adopt instead. In particular, I never hear the corrective action that people want to the NRC. Having the Navy license civilian power reactors does not seem feasible. The closest we got to suggested regulatory reform culminated with Vogtle and Summer's failure: combined licensing. The biggest benefit of the industry's request merely gave the builders enough rope to hang themselves with bad design and their own delays.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
Over the last decade the US Navy has commissioned 1-2 new nuclear reactors per year. They currently operate 100 reactors, more than any other org on the planet.
The US Navy has managed a total of 273 nuclear reactors, 6200 reactor-years, over 177 million miles, averaging 4 new reactors per year over 70 years.
They have done this with a perfect safety record. Zero accidents. Zero injuries, zero deaths, zero environmental pollution.
US Navy Cost: $2 billion for 2 x 400 MW reactors in Ford-class aircraft carrier
NuScale: $10 bn for 500 MW reactor
Westinghouse: ~$8 bn for 1000MW reactor
Military reactors should be more expensive, not less, because they operate under harsher conditions. But they aren't, because the US Navy doesn't have to go through the NRC.
The expectation is that their close-to-Trump investors will push for the dismantling of the NRC, which is something Republicans wholly support, which will of course make their rejection moot.
DOGE told regulator to ‘rubber stamp’ nuclear[1]
[1] https://www.eenews.net/articles/doge-told-regulator-to-rubbe...
FYI (this was news to me, so it may be to other people), DOGE no longer exists. So in the end they did manage to cut some waste, themselves!
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-doesnt-exist-with-eigh...
Maybe but the underlying tech still needs to perform which, as i understand it from public docs, has not. No amount of clear runway will make up for an airplane not being able to take flight.
The NRC is now mostly composed of Trump appointees. They’ve been quietly doing that. His most recent appointee was just made chair. Expect permits for friends of the Trump family and heavy regulation for competitors.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-and-environ...
Getting things I voted for that I didn’t even know about. https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-replaces-nrc-chair-as-...
Anyone could’ve picked up the mantle of fixing the NRC, which is an obviously broken agency. France transitioned the majority of its grid to nuclear back in the 80s. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, anyone could have picked up this low hanging fruit and fixed the problem. Nobody even tried.
Let's be honest it's one of the smartest and most useful place anyone could be investing - it's literally is whatever happens a way to contribute to mankind - even if it's just so that FB servers are off-grid ; it's still a huge win, I just hope Mark realize he has much more potential than what he is doing rn
The progress on 'nuclear' is so slow, that the same investment in Batterie and renewable would actually help a lot more around the globe.
We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive. Other forms are so far away from being useful, that the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete.
And the benefit? Every 3th world country and person can invest in small and big Storage + Renewable but they can't do the same with nuclear.
>We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive.
Refusing to build nuclear for decades makes it more expensive. If we start actually building reactors the cost will come down.
>the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete.
I would find this more persuasive if there were no new investment in carbon sources, but carbon sources have clearly remained competitive with batteries + solar, and global carbon emissions remain at an all time high. There's demand for baseload energy.
Building nuclear power stations includes a lot of labor-intensive hard to automate tasks like construction. Baumol's cost disease means it's getting even more expensive: rising general productivity leads to higher wages and higher costs in fields that cannot increase productivity as much as the general economic growth. That's why it's also still cheaper in countries with access to low-cost labor.
SMRs are a try to get out of it by building more but smaller reactors. The reality is however that nuclear has an issue with scaling down. Output goes down way faster than costs and most SMR designs have outputs far greater than what initially counted as an SMR.
Investment in renewable energy already greatly outpaces investment in fossil energy. The economic decision to keep using a fossil system is a different one than having to choose a new one. There's still problems that have no economically competitive renewable solution yet, but a lot of what you are seeing is inertia.
Base load electricity is simply an economic optimisation: demand is not flat, but the cheapest electricity source might only be able to create a relatively flat output. You'll need more flexible plants to cover everything above the base load. If you have cheap gas, base load does not make any sense economically.
For the last two years more than 90% of new power generation capacity added globally was renewable. Est 95% in 2025. So no, new carbon sources are not competitive.
https://www.wri.org/insights/state-clean-energy-charted
Highly misleading stat. That's referring to capacity expansion, not new construction.
Prior energy assets go offline and are replaced each year. The report you cite is discounting all of that, looking only at expansion above the baseline, then taking total renewable construction and calcuating renewable total construction's share of expansion. Apples to oranges.
If you look at the chart in your own link you'll see that carbon construction investment exceeds renewables still.
Chart: "Annual energy investment by selected country and region, 2015 and 2025"
I would love for what you say to be true but it just isn't, even by that agency's own stats.
Not sure I understand your point. In the plot you mention what the OP said certainly holds true for China and Europe (less so for the US). Also the Charts plot investments not just new capacity investments, I'm not even sure how you distinguish between the two?
The OP said new carbon sources are not competitive.
ANY investment is by definition creating capacity that would not be there without the investment. If carbon were not competitive it would not get investment.
If you sum up all of the carbon and compare to renewables in the chart there's more new carbon investment annually globally than renewables. (Comparing the dark lines vs the green line)
Also this is ignoring "low emission fuels", which are still carbon sources, natural gas and the like.
If you check the chart "Global electricity generation of zero-carbon sources vs. fossil fuels, 2000-2024" you can see that carbon sources were at an all time high in 2024. Growing slower is still growing.
We ought to be shrinking these to zero. I'm very glad to see solar and wind growing but my point is nuclear is worth supporting as an non-carbon energy source that could replace some of this carbon load because of its baseload characteristics.
"Global investment in clean energy and fossil fuels" shows a decline in fossil.
And there are plenty of good reasons why the investment in fossil fuels is still there because these investments can easily be not because its is still competitive, but its still competitive because base costs have been written off.
Aka the replacment of that coal power plant might have been 'competitve' because the whole infrastructure around it is still there and usable, because they might just replace the main burning chamber. Because for current stability reasons its easier to add gas turbines or keep them alive as backup because the renewable energy build out takes more time.
Nonetheless, the overall statistics says that renewable + batteries are now the cheapest energy source on the planet. Locally it might not be doesn't change the fact.
And no we do not need nuclear for baseload. Wind and solar are capable of baseload.
Alone my 4 year old EV has a batterie of 100kWh which would allow a heat pump to heat a house for 2.5 days.
Also countries in the north like Canada has plenty of waterenergy for baseload and countries closer to the aquator have extreme amount of sun.
Earthenergy can be still used in the most northern countries.
> but carbon sources have clearly remained competitive with batteries + solar
That's because carbon sources are almost never made to pay for their externalities (i.e. pollution during energy generation).
Yes for sure it just doesn't happen because huge projects like this have to be aligned and coordinated on complete different scales.
Thats why the french build a reactor in UK.
Even the CDU/CSU political party in germany, who was in power for 16 years uninterupted wasn't doing it.
So whatever we wish or think would happen doesn't matter if the only ones investing in nuclear are techcompanies and as somone else stated, they do this primiarily for existing nuclear capacity.
But whats happening now is a renewable revolution. Batteries are very cheap now and get cheaper and easier to make and you need the manufactoring capacity for them anyway (cars, storage projects) that they will break up every other area like normal housing.
Especially because now it reached africa as a continent and asia. Its exploding.
And its very easy to just extend this potential. Many normal areas are still vacant.
A LOT of countries probably will either neve be able to afford nuclear or will not be allowed to have it anyway.
Nuclear is expensive even after the reactor is build.
And I wouldn’t call it progress to still rely on steam machines for energy
What's wrong with steam?
It's better than carbon. And solar + battery requires more carbon to produce than nuclear energy as there's a lot of mining and physical construction involved + you must overbuild to supply power or rely on non solar sources.
All for building solar. Do not understand the constant need to denigrate nuclear in favour of carbon sources while doing so.
(If carbon sources were at zero this would be a different conversation)
Nothing inherently wrong with steam, just as there's nothing inherently wrong with spinning rust hard disks or punch cards.
We are at the end of the tech curve for steam, we have pushed it hard and made some super impressive technology, but it's not advancing anymore. Supercritical CO2 might have some advantages, or other fluids.
We have zero-carbon tech that uses non-steam principles, and is currently on a tech curve that's getting cheaper than any thermodynamic cycle. We have storage tech now which is an even bigger revolution for the grid than cheap solar, because a huge limitation of the grid has always been the inability to store and buffer energy.
I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.
(BTW denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources, because they use the same mechanism, except for some natural gas turbines)
What is this, the hipster approach to technology evaluation? Steam conversion efficiency doesn't make sense as a metric for nuclear because (AFAIK) fuel consumption per watt isn't the primary driver of cost for that technology. Or am I mistaken?
> I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.
I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
I doubt name calling is a sensible basis for policy decisions.
It's actually hipsters that are into steam, you know, the steam punks.
I don't care about steam conversion efficiency as much as I care that steam Rankine cycle engines are a solved problem so there is no more technological advancement. One of the biggest advancements over the past decades is using a Britton cycle in front for natural gas, ie moving away from steam engines.
> I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
If I understand you, yes of course use the more competitive technology. Sticking with steam when there are cheaper alternatives is a poor idea. But moreover as we look to what people choose as technology improves, we will find that steam usage will be relegated to things like geothermal, which like nuclear has essentially free fuel, but doesn't have to go down for a month to refuel, has the potential for more variable generation instead of undesirable constant generation, and is far less complicated.
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
The critique is not name calling, it's pointing out that the technology is mature and not improving, unlike the technologies that are recolutionizing grid energy right now across the world. The number of applications that use fuel to generate electricity via steam are shrinking. Perhaps hydrogen in the future, if electrolyzers ever come down the cost curve, but it's pretty speculative.
Horse buggies still exist, but mostly as novelties. Steam generation is headed the same direction.
Wind appears to be similiar than nuclear.
Nuclear has a few other major flaws: Uranium aka nuclear weapons risk, Dependency on uranium (yes china finally solved the Thorium issue but that happened this year?), geopolitical/terrorism risks (see ukraine).
And because i'm from germany: do you know that in bavaria, you still have to check certain meat for radioactivity?
> What's wrong with steam?
> It's better than carbon.
Steam isn't occuring naturally (except for geothermal etc) so you first have to put in energy to produce it
> you must overbuild to supply power or rely on non solar sources
True for every source of power because demand isn't flat across day/year
It’s an inefficient way of producing energy. Only 30-35% results in electricity
If you believe that figure, that's still comparable to solar's best ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency ).
Optimal steam plants can get do better, exceeding 50% in some configurations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant#Eff... ). Steam is awesome.
The difference that makes your statement misleading is that solar doesn’t pay for its fuel, the sun shines for free.
Could you please provide comparable figured of EROI for solar vs Nuclear?
For a useful comparison you have to compare both sides, not give a stat in isolation and assert it is worse without comparing.
What alternative do you propose that's more efficient?
30-35% of what? What are the inputs here? What is driving the cost? What are the externalities? And what is the end result in price per kWh?
> Nuclear is expensive even after the reactor is build.
Solar panels and wind turbines need maintenance too. And they have much shorter operational lives than nuclear power plants, meaning they'll need to be expensively replaced much more frequently.
> And I wouldn’t call it progress to still rely on steam machines for energy
Could you please explain your objection to steam-based power? Is it purely aesthetic, or is there some inherent downside to steam turbines that I'm not aware of? Also, concentrated solar power systems that concentrate sunlight and use it to boil steam[1] are significantly more efficient than direct photovoltaics.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
> Could you please explain your objection to steam-based power?
My guess would be that you're taking energy that you burn, you then boil water, water then goes through a number of turbines, then to a generator and then you might have electricity. Every step in that process is not 100% efficient.
Direct PV is, sunlight, cell that generates current, current gets transformed into whatever the grid needs. So it's fewer steps.
> If we start actually building reactors the cost will come down.
Why would I invest then if it can't even pay for itself?
Nuclear + Batteries could be nice too because the reactors will be always working at optimal rate without having to start/stop them to adapt to demand and let the storage manage peaks and lows. So investment in one domain can help the other too.
Can but investment in two things with the fundamental same topic can lead to diversation of funds.
Only if the nuclear investors are completly different than renewable than that would be a good idea.
we don't do it because we forgot to do it cheap. At 3bn/unit like GE's ABWR or chinese hualongs/cap's it's a steal. At 20+bn/unit it's not that fun.
There's the "we forgot" hypothesis, but I think a more realistic hypothesis is the "we got too rich" hypothesis.
Construction productivity has stayed stagnant for more than half a century, while manufacturing productivity has sky rocketed and made us all fabulously wealthy compared to when the first nuclear reactors were built half a century ago.
I don't trust China's public cost numbers as much as I trust their actual capital allocation on the grid. And I will trust GE's numbers once they have actually produced something at those numbers, as pre-build cost estimates for nuclear are not believable due to their extensive track record.
GE number is from japanese abwr. So chinese deployments are pretty realistic
We didn't forget how to do it cheap. The ALARA (As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable) policy simply made it illegal to do it cheaply.
Since you say ALARA made things expensive, maybe you can tell me how you foresee cheaper designs without it?
There's a lot of talk and some very shady science about getting rid of ALARA but nobody says what will change on the build that is causing the cost. Meanwhile China has adopted the same designs as in the West, without abandoning ALARA.
Those who advocate for changing ALARA see to be mostly trying to shift the Overton window on the public opinion of radiation rather than trying to pursue engineering and cost goals. I hope I am wrong on that!
The French transitioned the majority of their grid to nuclear back when I was a small child. Their electric prices are lower than Italy, Germany, or the UK. Of the big European countries, only Spain’s is lower.
Yes, but all of that infra is aging and no one saved for the day when they need to be replaced.
Given where France's national finances are... When that day comes, expect massive hike. They're essentially taking out a loan on the future
They are also completely unable to build any new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 13 years late on a 5 years project and 7x over budget.
Their proposed EPR2 fleet requires 11 cents/kWh and interest free loans. Sum freely. With the first reactor coming online in 2038, if everything goes according to plan.
New built nuclear power in 2026 just doesn't square with reality when the costs and timelines are factored in.
They're just purchasing power from existing nuke plants. All this is doing is making a formerly publicly available resource private. This will drive up energy prices for everyone else. These datacenters need to build their own generation. When people talk about how important it is that the US lead innovation in AI what they're really saying is how important it is for their quarterly results
> Our agreement with TerraPower will provide funding that supports the development of two new Natrium® units capable of generating up to 690 MW of firm power with delivery as early as 2032.
> Our partnership with Oklo helps advance the development of entirely new nuclear energy in Pike County, Ohio. This advanced nuclear technology campus — which may come online as early as 2030 — is poised to add up to 1.2 GW of clean baseload power directly into the PJM market and support our operations in the region.
It seems like they are definitely building a new plant in Ohio. I'm not sure exactly what is happening with TerraPower but it seems like an expansion rather than "purchasing power from existing nuke plants".
Perhaps I'm misreading it though.
If history repeats itself ... tax payers will be fitting the bill. Ohio has shown to be corrupt when it comes to their Nuclear infrastructure. [0] High confident that politicians are lining up behind the scenes to get their slice of the pie.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
Well, private investment is a great way to avoid subsidy nonsense.
You know that there's no actual private investment in nuclear in the US.
The nuclear industry is indemnified by the taxpayers. Without thar insurance backstop, there would be no nuclear energy industry.
Taxpayers are private. They earn money and give some of it to the state.
The weasel wording is strong here. That's like me saying that buying a hamburger will help advance the science of hamburger-making. I'm just trading money for hamburgers. They're trying to put a shiny coat of paint on the ugly fact that they're buying up MWh, reducing the supply of existing power for the rest of us, and burning it to desperately try to convince investors that AGI is right around the corner so that the circular funding musical chairs doesn't stop.
We got hosed when they stole our content to make chatbots. We get hosed when they build datacenters with massive tax handouts and use our cheap power to produce nothing, and we'll get hosed when the house of cards ultimately collapses and the government bails them out. The game is rigged. At least when you go to the casino everyone acknowledges that the house always wins.
Well in a way they are building their own generation by paying elevated prices for nuclear to keep it running, as most nuclear will be shutting off pretty soon due to cheaper alternatives.
Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive. Nuclear plants get more expensive the more of them we build, but for already paid-off nuclear reactors there's a sweet spot of cheap operations and no capital costs before maintenance climbs on the very old reactors.
Meta paying for all that very expensive maintenance is not a bad deal for others, unless market structure is such that the price for entire market is set by this high marginal generation from uneconomic aged plants.
> Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence.
But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.
Oops, that's a typo, should be transmission and *distrbution
Electricity costs have two components: "generation" to put power on the grid, and then the "transmission & distribution" costs which pay for the grid. You can likely see the costs split out on your bill, and the EIA tracks these costs.
Generation costs are falling, because of new technology like solar and wind and newer combined cycles natural gas turbines. However the grid itself is a bigger part of most people's bill than the generation of electricity.
Most utilities have guaranteed rates of profit on transmission and distribution costs, regulated only by PUCs. T&D tech isn't getting cheaper like solar and storage and wind are, either, so that T&D cost is likely to become and ever greater part of electricity bills, even if the PUCs are doing their job.
Generation in many places is disconnected from the grid, and when somebody makes a bad investment in a gas turbine, then the investor pays for that rather than the ratepayers. Look at Texas, for example, where even being at the center of the cheapest natural gas in a country with exceptionally cheap natural gas, solar and battery deployments hugely outpace new natural gas. That's because investors bear the risk of bad decisions rather than rate payers.
In places that let utilties gamble their ratepayers money, and where the utilities only answer to a PUC that gets effectively zero media coverage, there is a massive amount of corruption and grift and fleecing of rate payers.
A MW of nuke capacity is not replaced by a MW of solar or wind. New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission. Renewables without those things are worse than nuke - they are undispatchable like nuke and they are uncontrollably variable. We should build more renewables, but it is essential that we either tolerate intermittent system outages or massively improve transmission and storage, the generation is the least important part right now .
> New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission.
That's not correct, including storage with solar is still cheaper than nuclear. That's not measuring the cost by MW or GW, it's by measuring the cost of kWh, or the levelized avoided cost of energy, or the whatever metric you want.
And solar has the benefit of being able to avoid a good chunk of transmission by placing it at the site of use, so including transmission costs can only be to the benefit of solar.
>Unlocking Up to 6.6 GW
You could just as accurately sum it up by saying they would like to tie up nearly 6.6 GW, otherwise they wouldn't be making quite as large a deal. They wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have a financial technique to afford it, and it's still taken a while to make the commitment.
What about less-well-heeled consumers who would be better served if the effect of increased demand were not in position to put upward pressure on overall rates?
To the extent that new debt comes into the mix, that's just an additional burden that wasn't there before and this is a very sizable investment at this scale. So the compounding cost will have to be borne for longer than average if nothing else.
Naturally some can afford it easily and others not at all.
I don't really get the antagonism with these ersatz concerns. when FB builds its own datacenters, or it's own chips & racks, or it's own algorithms absolutely no one is saying "well there's no profit motive to build a completely custom server chassis" or "oh no, theyre taking publicly available math and making it private"
It's a purchase commitment, which enables the generators to secure loans to build out additional capacity.
Thank you for stating things so plainly, it's sorely needed on this site. The idea that success for big tech means a better society for workers or citizens is laughable and should soundly be rejected. They need to be broken apart yesterday.
Alternatively a more optimistic and high potential future is more plentiful and cheaper more reliable power and transmission is a huge win for society. So Id say its a perspective issue.
We in Ohio don't need more nuclear. The costs for maintaining what we have is already falling behind solar and wind (including batteries). Then there is the ecological costs that rarely get factored in.
And all these new datacenters are pushing up our electric bills. Maybe this deal could be competitive long term with newer reactor designs and if they are competently executed, but I'm very skeptical.
Maybe PA situation is different
Are there targeted investment vehicles for the general public, like an ETF?
Mark is doing much more than should already, and not the good kind, no at all!
This have a slight potential of becomeing a good one, if we only dream good things. Very limited details here, pure corporate self paise dominantly, can become anything. Another bad for example.
The promise of small nuclear reactors, modular reactors, thorium or whatever else has really failed to materialize at the same time that solar and battery has just leapfrogged the entire field. Nuclear has some big advantages, but it's still mired in humongous upfront costs and the intractable issue of nuclear waste. And I think we're also about to see an explosion in enhanced geothermal. The good kind of explosion.
How is more nuclear waste a huge win for society?
Well, because it means that other energy generation sources like oil, gas, and coal aren't being used there instead. Since they cause far, far more harm than nuclear waste does, it's a net win.
The same is true for solar and wind energy but without nuclear water. She cause far less harm than nuclear waste, even bigger win.
Our main problem isn’t energy production it‘s storage and quick reaction to consumption spikes. Nuclear energy doesn’t help with that.
the waste isn't a win, of course, but is a downside of a tradeoff that is massively weighted to the upsides for society -- that is (otherwise) completely clean always-on high capacity energy production.
We understand very well how to safely handle nuclear waste and make it a very (very) low risk downside.
Completely clean? Where does the nuclear fuel come from? How do we get it?
Does the handling of nuclear waste consider foul play by terrorists and such?
I didn’t he many worries about russian rockets hutting wind turbines in the war in Ukraine.
looking backwards in the supply chain for other externalities is a good point, but I'm not sure any energy production method is exempt from this?
Also, by the way, my perspective isn't about nuclear Vs X (wind turbines etc) - I like all the ones that are net clean and useful in different circumstances as part of a mix.
I'm just addressing the narrower point about whether nuclear per se is a net benefit for society, which I believe it is, massively.
I wish that Meta would pay for the extension of Diablo Canyon in California. They have had to jack up already sky-high electricity rates to keep it going, after deciding nearly a decade ago that it would be uneconomical to try to extend its lifetime.
Meta's nuclear intention is a perfect example of how tech is willing to pay far more for energy than other customers, and how it's driving up everybody's costs because we are all paying for that increase at elevated prices.
Nuclear is extremely expensive, higher than geothermal, renewables backed by storage, and natural gas. Nuclear is good for virtue signaling in some communities, but from the technological and economical perspectives, nuclear is very undesirable and unattractive. It's only social factors that keep alive the idea of new nuclear in advanced Western economies, not hard nosed analysis.
Here's a new preprint from Germans showing that even for Europe, a continent with very poor solar resources for many countries, new baseload is not the most economical route:
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
Geothermal energy is highly location-specific (it's great if you have a handy volcano nearby, of course), storage cannot meaningfully "back" intermittent renewables because it's only good for a few hours load from the grid (aside from pumped hydro which is effectively built out), natural gas peaker plants are very expensive and increase CO2 emissions. There isn't much of an alternative to nuclear.
Enhanced geothermal using fracking techniques developed in the past decades is being deployed now, and has very limited restrictions on where it can go.
> storage cannot meaningfully "back" intermittent renewables because it's only good for a few hours load from the grid
That's trivially untrue. If you can build a battery for four hours duration, then of course you can build another to get to 8, or however many you want. Batteries are being added to the grid at a huge rate.
> natural gas peaker plants are very expensive and increase CO2 emissions. There isn't much of an alternative to nuclear.
Gas peakers are about the same cost as nuclear. We will have a ton of gas peakers hanging around in the coming decades, and they will be used less and less as we get more batteries on the grid. Already, batteries eat peakers' lunch economically.
In the most optimistic grid modeling scenarios, nuclear can play a 5% or 10% role in a fully decarbonized grid. If you go full nuclear, then you also need a ton of batteries. And if nuclear was cheap, I would advocate going for a ton of nuclear plus batteries. But nuclear is super expensive, and doesn't scale fast enough to meet our needs.
We are currently at 20% nuclear power in the US and have a rapidly aging fleet. Even if we had investors who wanted to spend the $500B it would take to keep 5% of our grid as nuclear, it's unlikely we'd be able to build those 50 1GW reactors over the course of the next 20 years. Scaling SMRs seems even less likely.
I really hope I'm wrong and the SMRs somehow materialize and are cheap, but none of the startups are acting like the have anything real or the chops to scale. A new reactor getting built by 2032, as suggested here? Pumping out an SMR in 6 years, when design isn't even finalized, the company hasn't shown progress since abandoning an NRC application, does not seem plausible.
Diablo Canyon in particular is big (https://www.pge.com/en/newsroom/currents/energy-savings/diab...). It might be too big for their balance sheet. I imagine they picked the most economical sites to expand?
Nuclear isn't extremely expensive; in China it costs around $2/watt of power (compared to up to $14/watt in the US). It's just expensive in America because America's shit at building nuclear power plants efficiently.
> Nuclear is extremely expensive
Nuclear compliance and certification is extremely expensive. The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.
The largest cost associated with a new nuclear plant are the interest payments given that a plant may need to spend 10+ years sitting idle before it can be activated.
> The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.
That is not at all what I have seen, the costs tend to be from absolutely massive infrastructure needed to last a long time in harsh conditions that are difficult to repair.
Those seem more like fundamental engineering requirements.
Across four different regulatory structures: France, Finland, the UK, and the US, modern nuclear has proven to be excessively expensive and require massive amounts of high skilled labor. In the past century, high skilled labor was cheaper, but these days we need to pay welders and other construction workers higher wages because they have high productivity alternative jobs that pay better than in 1970.
Those high interest payments for 10+ years are also because EPC promises to build the design within 5-7 years then takes 2-3x the time. At Vogtle the fuckups both on design meant that many plans were "unconstructable" and then construction proceeded anyway with whatever they could wing together then they had to go back and make sure that whatever the bell was built still met the design.
Construction is actually very expensive and also the plant doesn't "sit idle" for 10+ years before activation.
What, we should have a wild west where everyone can set up their own nuclear power station without any compliance or certification? If not then these are part of the build cost... it's like saying we shouldn't include testing as part of the cost of building software.
If this were true china wouldnt be winding down its nuclear program in favor of solar and hydro
They're not winding down per say, nuclear has stayed steady, renewables simply exploded. Nuclear understandably more prone to schedule delays, but now it's mostly execution delays in months vs regulatory delays in years. They're still on trend with nuclear year plans. Solar simply scales much faster because all the displaced construction worker from real estate slow down can slap panels but not reactors.
They sort of are, nuke is a tiny % of their annual new capacity. Also, nukes don’t have to be cost competitive in a single party state.
Construction costs are not "trivial" if each I-beam you're using has a PhD in materials testing.
> compliance and certification
You can say the same for cars, houses, appliances, medical devices, elevators, stairs, disabled access, etc etc.
So, what exactly is your point? Yes, everything would be "much cheaper" if nobody had to pay as much attention to most details any more. Everything would also be much much more expensive for everybody else and longer term, or not work at all or reliably or safely.
It's a question of magnitude. Do you think that over-regulation of specific technologies is possible?
If the price of building stairs was growing each year in only the west to the point were we were opening one staircase 5 every years, it might be worth to ask some companies why. If they all say "the last guy who built stairs got bogged down for 25 years trying to meet all the safety standards". It might be time to relax some of them.
> It's a question of magnitude.
Maybe, just maybe, this may have some thing to do with the potential damages???
Here in Germany we still have safety checks for boar meat and mushrooms, decades after Chernobyl! (https://www.bjv-ffb.de/jagdpraxis/7286-2/)
That’s something that is possible only in the USA, for the best and the worst.
I don’t know any other country that would allow a truly private company to mess around with nuclear reactor.
The UK would quite happily.
For reference, China installs about 1 GW of solar per day. By this time next week, they will have surpassed the output of this entire project.
China is the world's largest electricity producer and installs a lot of generating capacity of all types. For example, China has 29 nuclear reactors with 31 GW of capacity currently under construction:
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Which leads to a shrinking nuclear share in their grid. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
I think that says more about their vast investment in other forms of power (particularly renewables) than it suggests a lack of investment in nuclear.
The nuclear share dropping is a very clear signal about a lack of investment. Shows that nuclear energy is no longer cost competitive, even in a "low regulation" environment.
It shows that strategic investment matters and people are looking at more than a single cost metric. Nuclear is behind today, but that doesn't hold a promise it will remain true into the future unless you stop investing now.
One armed bandit says explore as well as exploit. This delta you cited indicates the pendulum currently is more exploit than explore, but its not a static equation.
chinese nuclear is extremely cost competitive at 2.5bn/unit. They have other reasons, one being the ban on inland expansion fearing of messing up with 2 major rivers that feed the country. Current chinese units are basically borrowed and improved western designs, cap is basically vogtle's ap1000, hualong is a frankenstein of several western designs.
>borrowed and improved western designs
TBH this part seems key, even PRC couldn't operate full western designs reliant on western industrial capacity economically, part of it was simple incompetence of western supply chains (business closures / regulatory drama / sanctions). Nuclear seems viable once you strip out a lot of the politics that makes them uneconomical, hence PRC had to indigenize the designs since once western supply chains enter picture, the schedule goes out the window.
The US, in 2024, installed ~0.13 GW of solar per day.
https://seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight-rep...
6 GW Nuclear is either a tech company getting ahead of bad PR with a token gesture. Or its maybe? the start of something real.
Two years ago we were installing 1/10th of Chinese solar today?
Where are we at today? Can we catch up under this administration?
Where do we compare on a nuclear basis? I know my state installed nuclear reactors recently, but I'm not aware of any other build outs.
In a war game scenario, China is probably more concerned about losing access to oil and natural gas than we are. Not that we shouldn't be building this stuff quickly either.
> Can we catch up under this administration?
No. The future is Chinese, if the Chinese can maintain good governance.
A big "if"
Renewables and battery storage energy are unstoppable. Why take nuclear risk when you can get more than enough from solar, wind, and geothermal coupled with battery storage?
Geothermal is essentially negligible to the grid so it's weird to include it.
It's also so geographically constrained no one can choose to build it anyway.
lol, talking about risky nuclear investment and mentioning geothermal as ready to go alternative...
It’s not easy to go. It’s going, and has been for many decades.
Small scale where I am, when compared with hydro.
1 GW in nameplate capacity of solar panels powers fewer data centres than 1 GW of nuclear. So it needs to be "this time next month".
China is a country with over a billion people, Meta is a private company with under 100k employees, it doesn't really make sense to compare the power output of their investments.
1GW at noon, maybe 20% of that average.
China's building a bunch of nuclear too.
That isn't how solar capacity is measured. It's not simply its maximum instantaneous power potential
There are multiple measures, as generating technologies are complex. "Nameplate capacity" (given above) is one, "capacity factor", which is (roughly) the time-averaged output is another, and for solar averages about 20%, though that can vary greatly by facility and location.
Nuclear has one of the highest capacity factors (90% or greater), whilst natural gas turbines amongst the lowest (<10% per the link below). This relates not only to the reliability of the technologies, but how they are employed. Nuclear power plants cannot be easily ramped up or down in output, and are best operated at continuous ("base load") output, whilst gas-turbine "peaking stations" can be spun up on a few minutes' notice to provide as-needed power. Wind and solar are dependent on available generating capability, though this tends to be fairly predictable over large areas and longer time periods. Storage capability and/or dispatchable load make managing these sources more viable, however.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nameplate_capacity>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor>
It is how individual power generation projects and measured though. If you install a GW of solar generation, it means you installed solar panels capable of generating 1 GW peak. If you install a 1 GW of coal generation, then same thing. If you install 1 GW peaker gas plants etc.
The coal plant will have a capacity factor of 80% though. Solar will be 10 to 20%. And the gas plant could be very low due to usage intent.
Battery projects are the same (since they're reported as generators). Whatever nameplate capacity...for about 4 hours only.
It's close enough to how it's measured. China's terawatt of solar power capacity isn't producing 9000 terawatt hours in a year. Their total electricity use is 9000 terawatt hours.
As mentioned numerous times in this thread, the percentage of their generation that is nuclear is falling.
And yet they're still making a bunch more.
So only installing 73GW average capacity per year.
Yes. Meta's matching a whole month of China's solar growth, which I would call a lot.
A whole month of China's growth... to come fully online by 2036.
For a single company that's half a percent of US GDP.
Solar and Nuclear energy are different energy products. China is also bringing on an insane amount of nuclear energy.
In absolute terms, China installs about as much nuclear as the US does solar. So I can only assume you agree with the statement "the US is bringing on an insane amount of solar energy"? Because, once again in absolute terms, the US's solar buildout is trounced by China's. The US is losing the energy race, and nuclear isn't going to save it. The US will run out of fissile material before China runs out of sunlight.
There's really no risk of running out of fissile material. We can create it.
Depends if they start seeding clouds and doing geo engineering.
Nuclear and solar are different energy products that are complementary. This solar vs nuclear narrative is basic and anti progress.
For example china invested in solar so they can transition their energy system and get it paid by selling globally via subsidized cell manufacturing.
I don't think they will be able to sell export their nuclear tech globally since it is essentially repackaged US tech.
But yeah Im all for solar - more solar the better but it cant do firm power well.
China is building a tiny amount of nuclear in comparison to their wind, solar, storage, and HVDC builds. Only something like 50-100GW over thw coming decades. The quantity being built only makes sense as a strategic hedge, not as a primary strategy.
Renewables crash the money making potential of nuclear power. Why should someone buy ~18-24 cents/kWh new built nuclear power excluding backup, transmission costs, taxes, final waste deposit etc. when cheap renewables deliver?
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Wha...
China is barely building nuclear power, in terms of their grid size. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity.
Again they aren't the same product. Everyone always thinks power is only about $/kwh especially in hackernews. That is a strong proponent of the product but most definitely not all of it. Solar just does not work for large scale industrial uses cases (99.99% uptime). Even with massive energy storage to try and cover the edges. Its a great combo but not comparable.
How does your "large scale industrial use case" deal with 50% of the French nuclear fleet being offline?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
Or 50% of the Swedish fleet two times this year being offline?
At the same time it happened, the french solar was 92% offline and the french wind generation was 81% offline.
Maybe we should get the opposite conclusion from this incident.
Based on yearly average capacity factor?
Since that incident storage has been scaling massively. How does a nuclear plant compete with zero marginal cost renewables?
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...
Based on if it would run at full capacity like a plant would yes.
And no, storage hasn't scale at all yet, it would need a 100x increase before being useful for such events.
The proof is in the pudding anyways, if that works so well, why nobody does it?
Nobody does what? Solar installs are way way up.
Nobody does a storage based solar grid at a country scale.
Solar has only really been viable since ~2020.
Storage has only really been viable since mid 2024.
With timelines in the energy business being decades there's what currently exists and where we are headed are two completely different questions.
Looking at what gets built Q1 through Q3 in 2025 solar and wind met all electricity grid demand growth.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-and-wind-growt...
Storage is also scaling massively.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/11/12/german-network-operators...
If we just keep doing like we are then within 10-15 years renewables will be dominating every single grid globally.
I had exact the same discussion here 5 and 10 years ago (it will be ready next year!), I'm willing to bet that storage isn't going to cut it in the next 10 years.
There's at least two of orders of magnitude missing with the current storage gen and unless a new tech revolution happens, that's not going to work.
The supposedly massive storage which is built in your link doesn't even cover half a day of winter load.
Anything below 200GWh is a proof of concept at best.
I remember those discussions. 5-10 years ago people were summing all electric cars, including ICE cars starting batteries, to prove the scale was irrelevant.
Now the goalpost is shifted to "not even a single winter day without any other input of electricity". Which is a high 90s percent decarbonized grid. Not fully decarbonized, but almost.
In California storage is now timeshifting 50 GWh daily. An expansion that has come in the last few years.
Battery prices are down to $50/kWh when not using extremely expensive western batteries. Which means in the near future 50-200 kWh systems attached to houses. Excluding the BEV providing demand response to also help shape grid demand.
I think you should update your priors to 2026 data. We're in the point of the S-curve where batteries goes from nowhere to everywhere in the blink of an eye.
Just like solar was almost insignificant in 2020 adding a mere 140 GW over the year while in the first 6 months of 2025 we added 380 GW of solar.
Storage is time-shifting a lot of energy but it can't do long periods of time in large volumes - still a significant problem. What you are referring to is small incremental changes (like peak shaving or demand response programs in single hour increments). And it isn't only a co-ordination problem (which many companies are solving) its a physical/physics problem.
I am all for energy storage and solar - I've worked extensively in both. Their continued growth is a huge asset for humanity. That said they aren't a panacea and doesn't cover the full spectrum of energy needs even with continued cost reductions - they have constraints due to the physical reality of the world and how power is produced.
Add some gas turbines running carbon neutral fuels if deemed necessary?
Perfect low CAPEX high OPEX emergency reserve.
California has huge power cuts and has the benefit of having a very mild winter on top of that (can we even call a 10 degrees celcius minimum as winter? Personally I wouldn't).I wouldn't use them as a successful example of anything.
> In California storage is now timeshifting 50 GWh daily. An expansion that has come in the last few years.
I don't think you realize the scale of the problem, France alone consume 90GWh per day in winter, yes one day. And that isn't going to be any better with all petrol consumption switching to electric.
50 GWh shifting is just a proof of concept at best.
And yeah sure, see you in 2027, for sure it will be the year of storage this time.
The storage and grid upgrades have essentially removed all power outages in California? Again you operate on old information.
On the other hand California do have an absolutely massive air conditioning load in the summer.
> And that isn't going to be any better with all petrol consumption switching to electric.
Electrifying transportation is expected to add 15-25% extra load. A load that is extremely flexible in when it runs and thus perfectly match renewable intermittency.
In 2025 alone China added 168 GWh of storage.
I think you don’t realize how much even 50 GWh of storage causes the entire Californian grid to transform.
Have a read:
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
> On the other hand California do have an absolutely massive air conditioning load in the summer.
Well good for them but the vast majority of the western world has the opposite load, reduced load in summer where the panels operate full capacity and massive consumption when they produce close to nothing.
> In 2025 alone China added 168 GWh of storage.
Great, and they use over 1400 GWh per day.
In 2025 alone, it means they added an astonishing 3h of electricity storage (I'm rounding it up for you as a bonus)
> In 2025 alone, it means they added an astonishing 3h of electricity storage (I'm rounding it up for you as a bonus)
That’s really good isn’t it?
It would be unusual for solar to produce zero during the day, and the night is presumably going to be around 12 hours (in terms of solar generation). Energy usage is presumably less at night too.
The storage is already meaningful, with 3 of the 12 hours of zero generation covered (assuming usage is flat over a 24 hour period, which it isn’t), and if they keep adding at that pace it’ll be very significant.
Am I missing something?
> Am I missing something?
Yes, the missing piece here is most of the demand is in winter but most of the solar production in summer.
Daily load shift is a solved problem since the 70s with dams anyways, it's not the issue with solar. The issue is season load shift which is still science fiction as we speak.
> Yes, the missing piece here is most of the demand is in winter but most of the solar production in summer.
Wind power is anti-cyclical to solar. Both daily and seasonally.
Most of the time yes, but most of the time isn't a good answer when we talk about a grid. See the nuclear issue in France which had an even worse wind generation issue compounding the problem.
Not to mention the variability which is 10x worse than solar.
That is the expected variability? On-shore wind has capacity factors between 25-40% depending on location and size of wind turbine. That it reduces to 11% is expected.
Given that this happened once it is also quickly pushed higher by storage.
How would add nuclear power to this grid mix? Yes, that is over 100% of demand being generated by rooftop solar.
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
"Expected variability" is nonsense, you can't just say "yeah it doesn't work, that's normal"
> How would add nuclear power to this grid mix? Yes, that is over 100% of demand being generated by rooftop solar.
Absolute nonsense again, Australia has one of the dirtiest electricity generation of the developed world with 65% fossil. Nowhere near the totality of the demand is covered by solar, even if again they have almost no real winter.
> "Expected variability" is nonsense, you can't just say "yeah it doesn't work, that's normal"
Are you saying that hydro electric dams are nonsense because they store an intermittent energy source for later usage?
With renewables lowering the price floor it means that if you can utilize them you have a competetive advantage.
> Absolute nonsense again, Australia has one of the dirtiest electricity generation of the developed world with 65% fossil. Nowhere near the totality of the demand is covered by solar, even if again they have almost no real winter.
This is an australian state. Which often has 100% of its demand either covered by rooftop solar or wind power.
Without trying to brush the example aside, how would you add an inflexible new built nuclear power plant to the mix? How will you force everyone to buy expensive electricity coming from it?
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
That is where all grids are headed to in 10-15 years. From raw incentives and economics. You can't hide from it.
by providing firm power.
Which storage can solve. The problem is that "base load" as we know it is dead. It was only ever an economic construct, never a physical one.
Distributed renewables are unraveling the grid monopoly, meaning you can't just foist enormous nuclear subsidies on the tax payers anymore. They will vote with their wallets.
Some reads for you:
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Wha...
Storage can not solve firming in most of the world, maybe South Aus being exception, maybe. It can be solved by gas peakers or gas peakers combined with bess if you go fossils way, or hydro if you have it or nuclear. In Germany it'll be gas+bess but mostly gas, according to their Fraunhofer ISE org. In UK it'll be mostly gas too. In DK it'll be imports from hydro rich nordics.
It's interesting you mentioned nuclear subsidies when Germany poured on it's EEG renewables scheme alone more than double the cost of entire french nuclear fleet, both adjusted in today money
Who cares if there's a tiny portion of gas turbines left (optimized for low CAPEX) when we've solved high 90s% of the problem?
Its like complaining about the 3% fossil gas usage in France today when we still need to decarbonize shipping, agriculture, aviation, construction etc.
It is trivial to run gas turbines on carbon neutral fuel when the time comes if we determine they are still needed.
> It's interesting you mentioned nuclear subsidies when Germany poured on it's EEG renewables scheme alone more than double the cost of entire french nuclear fleet, both adjusted in today money
This is a backwards looking metric, we need to look forward based on the costs today. Are we paying 2011 solar prices or 2026 solar prices when building renewables in 2026? We pay 2026 prices.
Look at the proposed French EPR2 program. 11 cents/kWh 40 year CFD and interest free loans with the first reactor coming online in 2038.
Just an absolutely insanely large handout from tax money to force new built nuclear power into existence.
While the competition in renewables and storage are built on massive scale without subsides.
It's not tiny portion - it's a fully parallel grid. Germany as example needs to have 80GW+ of gas per Fraunhofer.
French epr2 nuclear will have smaller subsidies than german biomass. The handout of tax money for epr will be the equivalent of about 1.5-2y of german eeg now or even less in the future since it's projected to grow due to ren self cannibalization.
It's not that trivial to run gas firming on carbon neutral fuel aka biogas. First you don't have enough fuel, second- their opex will get so high due to low CF that you'll need a separate market for that and owners will be sure to ask a lot of $ for this firming to get profit and compensate no demand periods.
And we are talking only about direct subsidies. Germany will start subsidizing transmission this year tpo because their household prices are highest in EU, about 6bn/y. Most of this transmission is due to distributed ren expansion and need to avoid curtailment
That is a question for the 2030s to answer. Maybe demand response, storage and similar is enough? Either way, locking in trillions in nuclear handouts when the entire energy system will be reshaped before they are even online is by far the most stupid thing we can do today.
> French epr2 nuclear will have smaller subsidies than german biomass. The handout of tax money for epr will be the equivalent of about 1.5-2y of german eeg now or even less in the future since it's projected to grow due to ren self cannibalization.
Now you're trying to compare with the worst, because you know how outrageous the comaprison becomes when comparing with solar, wind and storage.
You do know that the EEG payments have been quickly reducing due to not needing subsidies anymore? And €20B in subsidies per reactor, which you did try to hide in "1.5-2y of eeg" is just a horrific waste of money.
> It's not that trivial to run gas firming on carbon neutral fuel aka biogas. First you don't have enough fuel, second- their opex will get so high due to low CF that you'll need a separate market for that and owners will be sure to ask a lot of $ for this firming to get profit and compensate no demand periods.
Or hydrogen, or hydrogen derivatives. Just pick whatever the maritime industry and aviation settles on as they decarbonize.
Yes. That is called "capacity markets". They already exist all around the world. Generally very cheap to run.
> And we are talking only about direct subsidies. Germany will start subsidizing transmission this year tpo because their household prices are highest in EU, about 6bn/y. Most of this transmission is due to distributed ren expansion and need to avoid curtailment
You do know that an electrified society requires 2 - 3x the grid size right? No matter the path we take we will need to massively expand the grid.
The only reason for curtailment is because Germany haven't divided the country into more markets because they expect to resolve the transmission bottlenecks in a few years.
nuclear provides for about 4-5ct/kwh if built cheap, everything included, looking at swiss data. Chinese units are built for 2.5bn/unit, so probably even cheaper than that. But yes, china is far from what france or sweden did with nuclear per capita
The problem is that western new built nuclear power costs 18-24 cents/kWh when running at 100% 24/7 without backup, transmission fees, taxes etc. based on Vogtle, HPC, FV3, Polish Ap1000s, EPR2s etc.
We can create imaginary renewable scenarios as well.
For example: "Assuming renewables and storage costs get an 80% price reduction (like you just gave nuclear power) then YY will happen".
Fla3 min profitability limit is 9ct and expected limit is about 12-14ct. And mind you 9ct scenario assumes 90%cf, while most US plants are 92-98%cf.
And that's for a totally f-up project... EPR2 isn't built yet so we don't know how it'll go per kwh, if EDF doesn't delay it for 20y it'll be in 6-10ct range, similar to Barakah built by Korea
Most of the cost in ren nowadays is transmission cost and firming cost, both don't have a big margin to shave, unlike nuclear
> Fla3 min profitability limit is 9ct and expected limit is about 12-14ct.
When assuming extremely subsidised interest rates. You can do the same for the competition to get an apples to apples comparison, but I know you don't want to do that.
> And that's for a totally f-up project... EPR2 isn't built yet so we don't know how it'll go per kwh, if EDF doesn't delay it for 20y it'll be in 6-10ct range, similar to Barakah built by Korea
The EPR2 subsidy proposal, yet to be accepted by the european commission, is 11 cents/kWh and interest free loans. Sum freely. Stop making stuff up.
> Most of the cost in ren nowadays is transmission cost and firming cost, both don't have a big margin to shave, unlike nuclear
How will you force anyone to buy that horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear electricity?
Here's an article for you:
The Quiet Unraveling of the Power Grid Monopoly
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...
No, fla3 interest rates weren't that subsidized. It would require EC approval like the EPR2 project.
I didn't make stuff up. Profitability limit would be 6-10ct, the cfds would be above that
You don't need to force anyone to buy nuclear. People will pay for electricity. In some cases price will be more influenced by the source like nuclear if it's expensive. In other cases it'll be influenced by transmission, grid forming inverters and firming costs
SA is one of the leaders in ren deployment. Just like CA. Just like Germany. All are dwarfed by france for cheap household prices. That's because even if lcoe for ren is cheap, full system cost grows
> No, fla3 interest rates weren't that subsidized.
You have a study you've linked several times in the past arguing how cheap FV3 is based on insanely subsidized interest rates and a payoff time stretching almost into 2100 if an equivalent project was started today.
> It would require EC approval like the EPR2 project.
Much has changed since 2006.
> People will pay for electricity. In some cases price will be more influenced by the source like nuclear if it's expensive. In other cases it'll be influenced by transmission, grid forming inverters and firming costs
What do you do when the grid demand for firm power is zero? Shut down the nuclear plant?
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
> All are dwarfed by france for cheap household prices.
About the entire difference comes from extra fees and taxes. The wholesale day ahead prices are about equal.
That is also running on the French paid off nuclear fleet nearing EOL. How will you get the current wholesale prices with the EDF2 fleet costing 11 cents/kWh and interest free loans?
The costs doesn't dissappear simply because you hide them in the tax budget.
> That's because even if lcoe for ren is cheap, full system cost grows
You have to look at it coming from the raw incentives. You can complain all you want about "full system cost", but that only applies in an monopolized system where the consumers don't have any choice.
Consumers have choices and can pick and choose what of the monopolized system they want by implementing their own distributed renewable generation and storage.
And they are still accelerating! They may actually reach 2GW per day by 2030.
Curious how this new design addresses the biggest safety challenge of nuclear reactors (the issue that was the root cause of the Fukushima accident and an indirect cause of Chernobyl): how do we ensure that the nuclear core temperature remains controlled during exceptional events (e.g., earthquakes, structural failures) when the reactor must shut down abruptly?
Chernobyl and Fukushima were different accidents and causes. Chernobyl was a systemic failure of the soviet system. Fukushima was a wild edge case that an earthquake and tsunami drained the coolant.
Edge cases don't count?
The truth is, all reactors ever built were considered safe at their time with whatever definition of safe. No one builds unsafe reactors. Yet they turned out not to be safe.
Nothing is ever perfectly safe and a lack of perfect absolute safety is not a valid objection. All sources of power have associated risks, even renewables. Wind power has 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour and solar has 0.02 [1]. Nuclear power has 0.03 deaths per terawatt hour (safer than wind), and it's worth noting that almost all of those are from Chernobyl, which was considered unsafe even at the time (they knew about the positive void coefficient). I'm not arguing that nuclear power is perfect, mainly because it isn't. But it's not like all other sources of power are idyllic havens of safety. There are always tradeoffs.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Those figures seem very optimistic. Uranium miners die early, often of horrific cancers.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33232447/
But the bottom line is that renewable costs are trending down, hard and fast, battery tech is just getting started, and development time for wind and solar is comparatively fast.
Future nuke costs at this point are speculative, development time is very slow, and even if new reactors were commissioned tomorrow, by the time they came online it's very, very likely solar and wind + storage would make them uneconomic.
IMO the attachment to nukes is completely irrational. There are obvious economic downsides, no obvious economic benefits - and that's just the money side.
Thanks for the reply! I think you're arguing with the wrong person in the second half, though. I agree that renewables could potentially be more economically viable than nuclear power[1]. My reply was disputing the "people can die from nuclear therefore we should never use nuclear" argument, not arguing about economic viability. Also I think that broadly claiming that your opposition is "completely irrational" is not a very tactical rhetorical move.
[1]: although since you're basing your claims on the speculative future state of solar technology 10 years in the future, I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to the speculative future state of nuclear power, but that's besides the point
Again I don't know why people do this framing that its either renewables or nuclear. We can and should develop and have both - they provide different energy products to the grid. Solar and storage ARE NOT viable at scale for 99.99% uptime requirements or industrial facilities that are in remote locations.
Nuclear is up against against nat gas, diesel or coal (in the rare states that still have coal power plants) for the most part for "baseload" or "firm" power.
Nuclear is by far the most advanced technology that we have ever developped on the planet at this point. Fusion is just 10 years away (every ten years) ;)
What mechanism causes solar power deaths?
Apart from the deaths from workers falling off the roof or from wind turbine towers (though these might be the only type of deaths included in these figures):
If mining deaths are included, coal, oil, gas and uranium probably do not look favorable at all, but renewables aren't perfectly safe either: there was a bridge collapse at a copper/cobalt mine in Congo two months ago that killed 32. Solar and wind use more copper per energy unit than other technologies, and solar and wind indirectly require battery technology. Lithium batteries contain lithium and cobalt. (Lithium mining seems relative safe, but 70% of cobalt is mined in Congo, which is known for artisanal mining, and the above-mentioned accident indeed seemed to happen at such a mine.) Wind, especially off-shore wind uses more concrete and steel than other power generation technologies (hydro seems like it'd use a lot too?), which could be explored too. (Course, these metals are recyclable, so you only mine them once.)
Battery factories also produce deaths sometimes, e.g. recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwaseong_battery_factory_fire, and batteries in operation as well as discarded batteries sometimes produce deaths too.
Accidents, mainly. Solar panels and wind turbines produce far less energy per module than nuclear, so you have to build much more of them. If you build enough of something, the odds that everything goes perfect every single time are quite low.
Ill wager a lot of deaths are accidental electrocutions from faulty wires.
They count as a different type of failure.
We knew what to do but screwed up hard is a operational failure and we didn't plan for it is a design/planning failure.
The people who are hurt might not care, but understanding the root cause is important to address them.
> Edge cases don't count?
Constrained edge cases are fine. Particularly when contrasted with coal and natural gas, which are, in practice, what everyone is competing against in America.
The edge case was predicted, but market and political forces chose to ignore it. The GE Type II reactor had known issues. [0]
I should add that I am not strictly anti-nuclear, and it is super interesting that some of the largest funders of anti-nuclear propaganda have been actors from the fossil fuel industry. [1]
[0] https://publicintegrity.org/environment/reactors-at-heart-of...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
One of the major reasons thats we have a climate crisis is that we knee capped Nuclear in the 80s and prevent new reactors and new technology development for 40 years. That left the only providers able to fill the gap were fossil based (oil, coal and gas) - which pumped out significant CO2.
Not surprised at all that oil and gas is still trying to protect themselves from competition.
Wild edge cases are to be expected when you do things at scale. If you build 20 buildings in different regions, at least one of them will likely face a once-in-1000-years natural disaster. And it's difficult to estimate how bad that particular kind of once-in-1000-years event can be, because you probably only have a century or two of reliable data.
Let’s not forget that you don’t have to be a socialist/communist nation to decide you want to do the cheaper thing. Without robust regulations I guarantee you a Chernobyl-like disaster could easily happen in the US because of less scrupulous companies cutting corners and choosing the cheaper path. With Chernobyl it was the government instead of a private company.
We can talk all day about how the system incentivized people playing CYA rather than actually trying to solve the problem (true and fair critiques), but when it comes down to it, this happened because the cheaper option was chosen and potential issues were overlooked. That transcends political systems.
I personally find highly hypothetical situations impossible to guarantee but I'm glad you have such a high degree of self certainty for a plausible scenario you have decided to give certain results to.
You should really consider educating yourself on the Chernobyl reactor melt down (read a book or two) to understand the level of calamity inflicted by the communist system. Stop trying to make it sound like that could happen anywhere because the pressures of capitalism could cause the same results. Its pretty eye opening how insane the chernobyl situation was.
The US had Three Mile Island. Japan had Fukushima.
One of the biggest arguments against nuclear is that reactors are insanely complex. Beyond a certain level of complexity, safety and predictability become impossible even with perfect management - which certainly doesn't exist in the nuclear industry.
This is especially true of any nuke system which needs external cooling, because stable water levels aren't a given any more because of climate change. Between floods, droughts, and storm surges, the environment is part of the system - something Fukushima discovered to its cost.
I am actually very familiar with the history of Chernobyl and the meltdown. What I’m saying is human greed and short sightedness do not suddenly go away because a nation decides on a different political/economic system. The implication that it only happened because it was the Soviet Union is what I’m taking issue with because it absolutely could happen in the US without proper guardrails. All it takes is one bad company cutting the wrong corner or firing the one person who spoke out. It’s very easy to see no society is immune to this.
I am not defending the Soviet Union or any of the decisions made during Chernobyl. So you should redirect your indignation/condescension.
The differences between soviet state and Us market based capitalism are completely different. Chernobyl didn't fail because of a simple case of human greed and short sightedness. You really haven't read the details of how Chernobyl came about - its truly wild.
While I don't disagree that there is always a risk (albeit very small) that the bean counters come in while the regulators are sleeping and risk the actual product (see: Boeing) - to try and put in a fear that the Chernobyl situation is just as possible you are reaching there.
Your underlying argument is that we shouldn't use high tech energy and enjoy its benefits because there's a chance somewhere that someone might abuse it but also, that might not happen. Its a blanket safety argument - don't do anything because theres risk.
> Chernobyl didn't fail because of a simple case of human greed and short sightedness.
You are overly reducing what I said and missing the crux of my point.
> You really haven't read the details of how Chernobyl came about - its truly wild.
I told you I have. Nothing I’ve said above discounts that and you know nothing about me. I’m not going to rattle off what I’ve read. You are being incredibly disrespectful.
> Your underlying argument is that we shouldn't use high tech energy and enjoy its benefits because there's a chance somewhere that someone might abuse it
Never said anything remotely like that at any point. And I never would, because I am not against nuclear energy. It is vastly superior to fossil fuels from a humane standpoint and for the environment.
Have a good rest of your week man. This isn’t productive. Go grind your axe elsewhere.
>What I’m saying is human greed and short sightedness do not suddenly go away because a nation decides on a different political/economic system. The implication that it only happened because it was the Soviet Union is what I’m taking issue with because it absolutely could happen in the US without proper guardrails. All it takes is one bad company cutting the wrong corner or firing the one person who spoke out. It’s very easy to see no society is immune to this.
Those are your words - they align exactly and I stand by what I said. No axe to grind here but will defend nuclear energy from weak arguments. Your line of reasoning is reductionist saying that what happened in Soviet Russia could simply happen anywhere because of corners cut in your words when in fact there have been no other nuclear meltdowns as terrible as Chernobyl since Chernobyl.
Whether you realize it or not you are making a safety argument by invoking Soviet mistakes and making them sound comparable and inevitable to the rest of the world which has had a pretty good spot record (less Fukushima and 3 mile, but those outcomes aren't comparable to Chernobyl).
You also have a great week - I hope my messaging sharpens what you are implying by your written argument.
You don't need to prevent it. You just need to prevent a catastrophe and even Fukushima did it relatively well - nobody died or will die from radiation. Current benchmark for (future) gen4 designs is having consequences limited to the area of the plant, think of 3MI but as worst case. But imo it's still an overkill, nuclear is one of the safest sources in terms of human deaths/kwh and the stat only gets better with gen3/3+
> You just need to prevent a catastrophe and even Fukushima did it relatively well - nobody died or will die from radiation.
“As of 2020, the total number of cancer and leukemia instances has risen to six cases according to the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).[5] In 2018 one worker died from lung cancer as a result from radiation exposure.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
These are small numbers compared to the number that died due to the tsunami and the massive evacuation (to avoid radiation injuries). The frustrating bit is that they could have avoided it all.
Lung cancer is hardly related to type and amount of radiation in that area. There was no medical expertise proving their cancer was caused by Fk. It was mostly done due to respect to the person that participated in the cleanup and their employees protection laws. Same with other cancers- it can very well be within normal incidence rate
The linked to article makes a different claim
" The workers' compensation claims that have been recognized by labor authorities include six cases of workers who developed cancer or leukemia due to radiation exposure "
So compensation has been requested for cancers, of which one death has been reported.
I point to a Forbes opinion piece from a pro-nuclear person https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/09/06/no-the-ca... .
In all cases no medical evaluation was done to prove the cancer was caused by radiation
Were you trying to reply to the parent? That’s more or less what I said.
No, the reply is on point if you go to the link
Sorry, complete reading fail by me.
It’s a distant memory from my radiography training, but solid cancers generally take longer to appear post radiation exposure (compared to eg leukaemia), and that case seems early. The article claims that you can’t get lung cancer from a nuclear accident. I’m not sure why they say that, it seems a bold claim.
Whatever the case, they paid out the compensation.
There is no cancer that can be attributed to a particular radiation source. Population rates of cancer might change, but at an individual level, you can’t prove a thing.
From the perspective of the power plant, that’s lucky.
It's not about being lucky. The dose was too low to make a measurable impact. And the effects can't happen this past as we have data about impact of heavy radiation after JP bombing.
So what we have is an industry with extremely low death rate impact that some countries put a stop on, like jp in the past or banned, like Germany, all while industries that caused more deaths like coal generation or even hydro are still used. And other branhces that do vastly more damage like smoking and alcohol are legalized. To me this is sad
This may just be me... but is anyone else in their head saying: "whats the catch?"
~~Meta~~ Facebook has made their money by de-stabilizing people's emotional state to keep them engaged and buying stuff via ads. I'm having a tough time connecting the dots between that and nuclear power.
"AI" is in the title. It's to power their data centers.
I get that and scanned the article. they are currently, and have been, working on "AI" for a bit, but strategically they aren't positioned to provide a service offering right now. Even if they are going all in and they got regulatory love, it would make way more sense to go after an energy source/provider that could provide it on a faster timeframe. they'll get their energy in what? 7-10 years?
So they can power all the AI data centers.
In terms of $ per unit of energy, would shutting down Meta give best bang for buck?
Power prices would presumably fall.
Meta (seemingly) bought the local race track in Beaver PA for a large data center. We were sad to see a world class racing facility go away as it finally started to hit its stride. But the offer was too hard for ownership to pass up
Racetrack memory is an emerging alternative that might obviate the current DRAM shortage especially for datacenter use, so in a way this makes a whole lot of sense.
https://www.ibm.com/history/racetrack-memory
Is that word salad?
It's called a "pun", albeit maybe not a very good one.
Isn’t that just quantum bubble memory?
Good bot.
After reading through all press releases I still haven't seen any details on any money changing hands?
The previous ones from Google and Amazon at least specified that it was based on PPAs. Where all they did was bind themselves to buy X amount of power at Y cost if the company could deliver.
Taking a step back I have an incredibly hard time seeing how new built nuclear power will cope with renewables fundamentally reshaping our grids.
We're seeing the unraveling of the grid monopoly infront of our eyes [1] and renewables are set to completely crash all "baseload" markets. [2] Likely forcing them to become stranded assets.
[1]: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...
[2]: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Wha...
I'm kind of surprised there's so many nuclear power companies. I remember Google signed a deal a year or so ago [0] with a different one (Kairos). I wonder why they're not in this deal? Is it all connections and funny money? Or do any of these have real shots at making something useful?
I was thinking how the dotcom bust left a lot of dark fiber infrastructure which helped the internet take off after that. It would be great if the upcoming AI bust (if it happens) leaves a bunch of power generation and new nuclear tech behind.
[0] https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/su...
The dark fiber analogy doesn't quite work though, because unused fiber just sits there harmlessly. Nuclear plants have massive decommissioning costs ($280M-600M+ per plant), ongoing waste storage requirements, and if the companies go bust, taxpayers are likely on the hook. The EU alone is underfunded by €118 billion on decommissioning. Meanwhile batteries and solar keep getting cheaper every year without the “who pays to clean this up in 50 years” problem. Seems like a very roundabout way to hope for public benefit.
with small companies it's like with startups - some might fail so maybe it's better to have more players. I still think this is strange - if they wanted nuclear - could have approached GE for some BWRX of ABWR or W-house & KHNP for some nice AP1000/alike units
Right. Meta wants big enough plants that an AP1000 or two would be the right size. They're known to work. There are four in operation, two in the US, and another dozen or so under construction.
Most of the small nuclear reactor startups hand-wave the failure modes and argue that they don't need the hulking big expensive containment building. NuScale claimed that. They wanted multiple reactors sharing the same cooling pool. If they ever had a leak, the whole set of reactors would be contaminated, even without a meltdown.
If we look at the big reactor accidents so far, there's Chernobyl, with no containment building. There's Fukushima, with too small a containment unable to contain the pressure. And there's Three Mile Island, where a large, strong containment building contained a meltdown. Three Mile Island was an expensive disaster, but not hazardous outside the plant. That's the failure mode you want.
We might be better off at developing better techniques for welding thick sections to make hulking big, strong containment vessels. There's been progress with robotic welding of thick sections.[1]
[1] https://www.agrrobotics.com/trends-s-industry-analysis/roadm...
> surprised there's so many nuclear power companies
This is actually American capitalism working at its finest.
Have you seen a video of a slime mold "solving" a maze? It reaches out in every direction with thin tendrils until it makes contact. (Then the game shifts.)
We have a sense, like a slime mold picking up on the "scent" of food, that there is energy. But there are lots of good hypotheses for how we get there. So we try them. Not exhaustively. But multiply. When someone demonstrates they've got it, the game will shift to consolidation and scaling.
I won’t take Meta’s new ambitions serious unless Zuckerberg does something like have a “fireside chat” next to Ezra Klein moderated by Kara Swisher where he awkwardly spams the word “abundance” while staring Klein square in the brow. And then buys Vox Media.
This is to appease the current US administration running the federal government that for some odd reasons is abhorrent to the idea of using cheap, cleaner renewable energy and battery storage to decarbonize our air and grid.
To do what Grok has been doing?
Yikes.
This is cool, but I'm waiting for the announcements for datacenters to start establishing on-site geothermal power for baseload power supply.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250612778008/en/XGS...
seems like they're getting the ball rolling, will be interesting to see how this scales
Tech scale isn't the problem.
The problem is geographic. You need hot rock near the surface. It's too expensive to drill deep in most places.
On-site? (Behind the meter)
You'll be waiting a while as the subsurface siting is highly specific. These would be unicorn projects.
Datacenters are trying to just pull geothermal electrons from same geographic grid, at best.
I remember when terrapower was supposed to build a kind of reactor which would use depleted/unenriched uranium which was basically a hole in the ground slowly burning up, but now it seems they're doing a molten sodium "classic" reactor, is that the same thing and I am confused, or did they change their strategy?
I'm glad somebody is doing it, even if it's Meta. The world really needs more energy and nuclear is a great option
As technology improves, we have less and less need for nuclear. The continent with the greatest need for nuclear is Europe, and these German grid modelers have taken a look at the EU grid with the latest data and decided that additional baseload generation (like nuclear) is not required and will likely increase costs if built:
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
Germany took it's last three nuclear reactors offline in 2023 and now the primary source of their electrical generation is coal.
See https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
That is factually incorrect. The primary source is wind at 132 TWh in 2025, followed by solar with 70 TWh.
Lignite was third with 67 TWh and hard coal sits at 27 TWh.
https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...
Lignite is coal, so that'd make coal #2
Official source for 2025 Q3: 64,1% renewable 20,6% coal 12% gas
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
Your claim about current electrical generation is incorrect and obviously not supported by your source, which shows data from 2021.
In addition to the other corrections here, I'd like to add one more remarkable fact: in 2025 the share of German electricity generated by solar increased to 18% from 14%. That's in a single year, in a country with terribly low levels of sun! Nuclear generated 5% of electricity before it was shut down, and had generated that same percentage for more than a decade (that's as far back as the chart I saw went).
It's remarkably easy to scale solar to very large amounts in short time periods. Far easier than building a new nuclear fleet.
Is it though? Do we need more ads and more social media company AI?
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Not the OP, but I think the argument is that even if they're doing it for the wrong reasons, it might still end up being a good thing.
A core assumption of capitalism is that when individuals act in their own self-interest, their actions tend to produce outcomes that are beneficial for society as a whole. This seems like a compelling piece of evidence!
> This seems like a compelling piece of evidence!
Bit of a premature celebration here, we won't know if it is for 10-30 years.
I think that's, generally speaking, not true, as evidenced by the fact that climate change is still happening almost entirely due to selfish motivations of oil companies and bribed politicians.
I think it's probably a good thing in this case.
Yet, globally, the world is moving towards renewables regardless of big-oil interests. I don't think even the most hard core activists are expecting to close everything coal, gas and oil related overnight, so we need to wait until the energy transformation is finished. It won't be led by the US, Russia and the Middle-East, that's for sure, but it will happen.
Even if that's true, we're already facing negative consequences from climate change, and it's affecting developing countries the most. The oil companies knew about the risk of climate change in the 70's, and actively suppressed it and pushed pro-petroleum narratives instead.
Certainly the selfish greedy ambitions of corrupt politicians and short-sighted corporations aren't good for the people dying and being displaced. I mean, we can play with numbers and try and argue a "greater good", sure, but it does seem a little convenient that we can act like greedy self-interests are helping everyone when there are current victims.
I think the idea behind that concept is not that it's true. The idea is we will never change human self-interest and greed. So we build systems where even with that as the primary motivation, it still has more important secondary effects that probably benefit us.
And I'm saying that that hasn't historically been the case.
There are plenty of quarries that effectively condemned land that destroyed entire ecosystems because of greedy mineral companies. Pretty much anyone using this forum is using a product that was produced by unethical and/or child labor. We're already seeing negative effects from climate change, effecting many, many people, mostly in poor countries, and it's likely to get worse before it gets better.
You could argue that these systems benefit some people; I certainly benefit from having cheap electronics, but of course you can always cherry pick good examples from pretty much anything. This is with the current system that we built.
Now sure, there might be some hypothetical system that maybe fixes these problems, but due to the use of the word "evidence" in the comment I was responding to I didn't think we were talking political theory.
What kind of logic is that? It reminds me some people I know that vote to extreme-right parties because "well, we know that the regular parties are not gonna change anything. These new guys may do something new. Who knows, let's vote them and find out"
Well, no, I think that the claim is that having nuclear power plants is better than not having them. If they're not sucking energy off the grid (like what is happening right now), that at least will help avoid regular people like us having to pay the increased prices and indirectly subsidizing them.
And nuclear energy is clean (from a climate change perspective at least), and so if they're going to keep spending huge amounts of energy AI training anyway, it's probably better to do that in a way that isn't going to keep boiling the planet.
Also, if there is any kind of excess energy then it can be fed back into the grid, meaning that grid power can be fed from something relatively clean compared to something dirty (like coal).
I'm not entirely sure how this relates to the party thing. I'm saying that sometimes something selfish in a capitalistic system can occasionally still be a net good. I didn't think that was controversial. I'm not saying we give Zuckerberg a trophy or anything.
hell yeah!
The biggest barrier to nuclear energy in our country is the linear no-threshold safety model. We know the model is wrong, opens up operators to infinite liability, and since adopting it the nuclear industry has effectively been dead.
Even just a basic common sense threshold would make nuclear more viable overnight.
Agreed, but I don't think that dumping ALARA will fix nuclear cost. There's still plenty of stuff in a nuclear reactor hot enough that we have to worry about keeping it from being inadvertently released.
it's one of but not biggest. Biggest is poor supply chain. Try copy rosatom first in their variety of services...
This is a purely political move. It will take a decade or longer if ever to ever get power from this. And yes it says "as early as 2032" but we know how that goes.
Why nuclear? Because it's cleaner than fossil fuelds but appeases the administration because it isn't wind or solar, which would immediately solve any power generation problems.
You might be tempted to say, since this always comes up, "what about base load?"
FFirst, batteries can solve that problem.
Second, you use a mix of power and when the Sun isn't out (ie night) is when power is cheaper from other sources.
Third, data centers don't really need base power at all. You just run the DC when you have power and don't when you don't. There's precedent for this. Google has a DC in Scandanavia that they shut down a few days a year when it gets too hot, otherwise it's just cooled by ocean water.
What I find most funny about all this is that all these big tech companies are kowtowing to the state in the exact same way they accuse Chinese companies of doing.
> Google has a DC in Scandanavia that they shut down a few days a year when it gets too hot, otherwise it's just cooled by ocean water.
They do? Which facility is this? I'm quite surprised to hear this would happen, in Scandinavia of all places.
wind and solar need firming. Currently firming capacity in US is getting scarce. It can be fixed a bit with better transmission but otherwise you need to expand it. China is expanding firm power with coal, gas and nuclear. Germany will expand gas.
Bess will not solve the firming problem. And no, if you build a multibillion datacenter you want to run it around the clock as much as possible. But yes, some datacenters don't have such requirements, but here we are talking about meta
Do any of their vendors have existing products or is this a Boom Aerospace situation?
Yes. Vistra is the largest power generator in the US [1]. Most of the deal that Meta announced is with Vistra, and the power will come from some existing facilities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vistra_Corp.
How does Vistra compare to PG$E?
All that energy will surely translate into quality of life for the rest of us.
It likely will.
Not immediately but in a decade or two.
Infrastructure investment is a good thing, and almost always strictly better than not having it.
"Infrastructure investment" is not fungible. There's either demand for this power where they're adding it, or there's not. If there is demand, then it's created by AI. If there's not (i.e. AI bubble pops), then there's excess capacity where we don't need it.
Can you or anyone else please take us through this likely outcome?
I think the arguments for this would possibly be, if AI continues to be useful (generation demand skyrockets): Meta would possibly have a positive ROI for these investments which would lead to others copying the investment strategy and building more nuclear. If that happens a large portion of AI demand would become green(-ish) energy.
If AI demand lowers (generation demand plummets): Meta would have subsidized a bunch of nuclear reactors which would likely continue to produce power for 10 years - 50 years.
A big reason I have heard for lack of nuclear build out is the lack of starting capital but after they are built they are generally stable and maintenance is predictable.
An example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant. It may be turned down eventually but a 60 year runtime is pretty impressive for 60s engineering!
> A big reason I have heard for lack of nuclear build out is the lack of starting capital but after they are built they are generally stable and maintenance is predictable.
I have also heard this, but given Meta's announcement is mostly in funding and extending the useful lifespan, doesn't that indicate without an infusion of capital, the ongoing operations are not cost effective?
I'm glad that individuals with no democratic control are allowed to declare large swaths of society to suffering because, maybe, in the future things might get better.
FWIW, it took nearly 150 years for commoners to benefit from the industrial revolution. The idea that I must suffer and my children must suffer and their children must suffer so some future plutocrat can get a fatter nut is pathetic.
I mean, we could just give up and go back into the swamps that we crawled out off millions of years ago. But I'd rather have more clean power come online. Energy is EVERYTHING.
It's not a good thing when said infrastructure produces ridiculously dangerous waste & fallout risk though.
"Fallout risk" and "dangerous waste risk" are such non-issues that have been so absurdly elevated in the public perception that the fear of them has caused far more deaths than the risks themselves.
How exactly? Meta isn’t doing this out of generosity to society. They’ll be consuming this and vastly more energy to ultimately increase their own profits?
They were being sarcastic.
While I'm sure that the vast majority of this energy is going straight to AI server farms, I'm also hopeful that this will renew efforts to switch to sustainable energy sources.
The entire world is switching to sustainable energy at a tremendous rate because they are the cheapest source of electricity, and storage is economical on every grid's peak price to low price swing that I have seen. In places like Pakistan solar is taking over because the grid made really poor investments in very expensive fossil fuels. In Africa, a panel and a battery is cheaper to run than a generator, which is life changing. As that scales up it will revolutionize entire economies.
In the US, the vast majority of new generation is renewables, matched with a ton of storage. There's some gas too, but it will be uneconomical to run these gas plants before their end of life:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/08/21/eia-projects-record-6...
The biggest impediment to cheap sustainable electricity is political and basic ignorance of the voting public that allows utilities to continue installing familiar, but more expensive fossil generation.
what has home solar to do with country's grid and industrial needs? No country has a VRE+BESS solution to fully sustain itself. South Australia might get close having extremely nice weather patterns but even they will periodically import from fossils neighbors. Nuclear was dirt cheap in US but it didn't help to expand it. and now it's not that cheap since supply chain is gone
> what has home solar to do with country's grid and industrial needs?
Why are you asking this question without answering it? Unless you're assuming I said something I don't, I don't understand the relevance here.
> No country has a VRE+BESS solution to fully sustain itself.
A couple of fallacies here: non existence yet doesn't mean it's not possible, especially for a grid with equipment lifetimes measured in multiple decades. Once it makes sense to build a VRE only grid it will take several decades for it to happen.
> Nuclear was dirt cheap in US but it didn't help to expand it. and now it's not that cheap since supply chain is gone
Nuclear was completely overbuilt, based on bad over predictions for energy demand, leading to excess orders, then the only plants still being under construction being the ones that were poorly managed, leaving a distinctly bad financial taste in the utilities' mouths. They had to be bribed by state legislatures in South Carolina and Georgia to let them pre-bill ratepayers and also put ratepayers on the hook for overages on construction for new reactors, which everyone expected and which happened disastrously.
It's really unclear that nuclear is ever going to be cheap when its main costs are high skilled construction labor, concert and steel. None of those inputs are getting cheaper and the only chance at making logistics and management better seem to be small modular reactors, which are inherently cost inefficient due to losing the scale advantages of 1GW reactors.
It's no longer 1970, and the costs and technology of the modern economy are fundamentally doffeeent. We have learned so much, and I hope that we have learned tha nuclear doesn't fit with our advanced technology of the 21st century.
Biggest cost factors for current nuclear isn't steel, nor labor. It's interest, especially when the project takes 20y instead pf 4-6/unit with several built in parallel
And what is that interest for? The loan to pay the labor and buy the steel and concrete.
The biggest cost of my house may be "interest" but that's just an accounting game.
The cost of interest depends both on cost of materials and duration. A plant that takes 20y to build will cost much more vs a plant that's done in 6y. If we relearn to build fast(er) nuclear will get cheap enough to get a place on the grid
I'm sure some people were hopeful that the proliferation of fast food would lead to more exercise and healthy eating to balance it out.
If you're ruining the climate with your AI data centers, you really should bring your own nuclear reactor.
I would be very skeptical about Meta on top of running any reactor. Move fast and break things doesn't work out well in that area of business. Why don't they invest money into more renewables instead, to power their data centers? That seems a safer bet and choice.
Some Shreck Power vibes.
I despise Facebook and all that it stands for, but if the surplus value that it has extracted from humanity over the last two decades is reinvested intelligently into nuclear energy, I'm actually okay with it.
Despite the hype that you see on Twitter, the hard tech startup scene is actually incapable of large-scale engineering coordination on the level needed for a nuclear power plant, or even a gas turbine.
If any innovation on fission reactors is going to be successfully commercialized, we will need to see billions of dollars of investment over medium to long time horizons.
Of course, the millstone around the neck of nuclear power is that it's a dual-use technology. There's probably a lot more behind the scenes that's been done to stifle the industry effectively for non-proliferation reasons, but masquerading as cost, regulatory problems, environmental concerns, etc.
So is the metaverse completely dead and over with?
Extremely awesome. If you can't praise this in spite of however you feel about AI, or about Meta, you need to reevaluate your priors.
Nuclear power from the company that moves fast and breaks things?
I am pro-nuclear power, but I miss the days when companies would, you know, return their profits to investors, so those investors could then invest in other companies doing different things, instead of all corporations tending towards generic everything-investment vehicles.
This is partly due to tax policy. Investors don't want this. Distributing dividends is less efficient capital distribution because those capital gains are immediately taxed rather than be deferred into a higher share price with no tax drag.
This is why every tech company does buybacks(other than meta which started a dividend when Mark got sick of high interest rates on his debt, they still mainly do buybacks though)
Oh no, capital would be taxed!
Don't threaten me with a good time.
If they want this to work trump and co gotta be out asap
Theyll just steal it
So, the result will be rising energy bills for everyone?
if you think it's near impossible to reach a real human for a difficult customer service problem now, imagine by the end of this decade
I also think nuclear energy is responsible for customer service.
usually don't have to explain steps in thinking on HN
what do you think the end result is for the amount of machine-learning in use once the resource barriers go away?
like first the power availability limit, next cpu+memory availability?
result: every human job goes away that can be turned into a survey of questions
like all callcenters
It'll either work well, and then that's what'll happen, hooray, or it won't work well, and competition will allow businesses to differentiate. Just make sure you're not voting for the people who disable competition if you're worried.
Are all these techbros drunk with power? The other day it was cloudflare guy trying to play international politics, now Zuck wants to get into nuclear.
Monopolies are insane. Why is myspace working on nuclear power?
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So now we’re harnessing a the dicy and capital intensive power of the atom to create the illusion of speaking to people because we can no longer strike up a conversation with a stranger on the street. Cool, cool. Personally I’m going to stick to real people with no divergent neutron chain-reactions involved.
sure, let's build more energy sources with finite fuel supply and negative environmental impact while there's better options available <.<
These companies abandon software? Does anyone really think this is going to end well?
Are there regulations in the US that you need to fund decommissioning up-front? I think that's the case in the UK at least.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff for nuclear. I wrote to the government to get them to remove 10 CFR Part 20 Subpart E financial requirements but obviously that hasn't happened. You can start from there and branch out.
Don't think so but after seeing electricity prices rise and even double in areas by giant data centers many areas are requiring them to provide their own power
Nuclear energy company valuations are in the puny low ~100s of billions.
But Meta can be sued for so much more ...
Remember prior to the AI boomb electrical bills were still high.
Now we see more demand and the building of the grid to meet that demand....yet the high cost is still remaining the same.
Most of the cost of residential electricity is the distribution network, not generation. Supply/demand dynamics only really come into play during extreme scenarios like the Texas winter outage a few years ago.
How much increase in consumption is due to AI ?
The price isn’t the same, it’s more expensive, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. This particular project is slated to take a decade — the last nuclear reactor that the US built was also slated to take a decade. It just opened in 2024, and was approved for construction in 2009. This is a long-view solution to a right-now problem.
We should have been keeping up with this infrastructure stuff all along… but I’m really not convinced all of these companies are going to be using this shit in 5 years, anyway.
I've begun to realize that the prices of everything seem artificially set to lock us into some form of farming. Carefully balanced.
Look for home prices, doesn't matter where in the US it's always like $350-$400k. Why?
Why do you think home prices are always in that price range? That's not been my observation.
Stares in Seattle home market.