I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
Nuclear has several major cost problems if it's own. Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive, the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions. The list goes on. Basically:
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.
None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.
If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.
But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.
The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.
This must at least partly be region-dependent right?
In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).
From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?
This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever
Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!
There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.
Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.
An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.
Peak oil was supposed to have happened decades ago but current projections put it well past 2050. Demand for oil is going to fall due to electrification long before we run out of sufficient oil production capacity.
It is clear at this point that peak oil was another failed Malthusian projection. I don't think peak oil is guiding much national policy aside from the national security aspects.
Yes. There's all kind of hydrocarbons that aren't economic or barely so, like oil shale or shale oil, with is rock with a stain on it.
Interestingly, Venezuelan extra heavy sour crude oil is not profitable to use at $55 a barrel, the price before the Iran war, but is profitable when it's over $90 a barrel.
It's easy to make money when someone else pays the costs but you get to keep the revenue.
This is wrong. The peak of conventional oil is documented around 2007. Since then, Europe's economy has been slowing down (if you look at physical indicators like how much is transported by trucks or what surface is being built each year, not artificial ones like the GDP).
Global peak is estimated to be around now (a few years ago maybe?).
But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too
has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it
It should be in the national interest. But every nation is determined to let Russia have the last resources in 30 years by boycotting Russian oil and gas.
As we hear downthread though, we'll have warp drives by then.
there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision
Mining isn't a great argument against nuclear. Uranium fuel has an incredibly high energy density so a relatively small amount of high grade ore can be converted into a large amount of electricity so even when compared to the one time input from mining required to produce all of the components that go into making a PV installation it can still perform favourably. Uranium mining is also transitioning away from open pit mines to using in-situ recovery where a liquid solution is injected into a uranium ore formation to dissolve the uranium before recovering the solution, about 55% of current uranium production uses this method already.
Slavery is obviously not an issue in a country like Spain, but any kind of mining operation here seems to be heavily opposed by the people that live around the potential sites, for environmental reasons.
Nuclear fuel is available from lots of countries, including Canada and Australia, plus deposits in Europe that aren't being minted because uranium is very cheap.
Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).
The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.
Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.
> Nuclear plants along the Danube river in Hungary and Romania were forced to cut output this week and could be shut down completely in the coming days due to record low water levels.
Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.
Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.
So many reactors off was a special event of delayed maintenance, things are done so that does not usually happens.
And it's not true to say that Germany reactivated coal reactors for French lights.
Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.
That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable
Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?
Because for power creation there are alternatives, but for healthcare there aren't. Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue. Ideally we could use land currently dedicated to energy crops to install solar panels that operate at a significantly higher efficiency.
An awful lot more countries in the world have the potential to sovereign manufacture relatively simple renewables than the massive engineering in reactors
Because for healthcare profit isn't a motive to begin with (or at least, it shouldn't be) and there aren't many different alternative sources for it either.
And in a society that hasn’t made health care profitable (Italy), I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.
In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.
There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.
I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.
I had an non urgent injury in Spain last week. Went to A&E and was seen by a doctor, x-rayed, and given advice and the results within 90 minutes. I paid zero euros for that on top of my taxes. Maybe it's an Italian problem... And for sure Spain has its own issues as well, but private is not always necessarily better.
I've lived in Spain a couple years ago. I've seen the quality of its health care. Its easily 20 years behind the US and that's being charitable. The family that lived next to me had a man who had the exact same break I had had 20 years before. He had worse, more primitive care than I did in the US decades before. I had to explain to them why it was a bad idea for him to sit in his wheelchair all day because nobody in the Spanish system seemed to know how to care for a simple broken leg. You got what you paid for...
PS Spanish taxes are absurdly high...insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries. All that and an actual working economy and energy system.
>I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries
I actually do since I'm Italian lol
Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant
> I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.
> In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance
The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
You lost any credibility with the $5000 comment. You have no idea how the american system works and I'm not even american.
Your snarky tone is absolutely disgusting, I would love for you to receive the same answer when talking about some health issue caused by terrible healthcare.
Terminally online people like you who lose all empathy when something they believe in is criticized are very funny and sad at the same time.
A broken limb, fractured elbow, deep cuts/lacerations/abrasions on my legs, elbow, and arms. I was in pain, my wounds were filled with gravel and dirt, and I just closed my eyes and laid on the floor and disassociated for twelve fucking hours. My girlfriend was losing her shit trying to advocate for me.
Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff’s incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes.
My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards.
Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged.
> The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own.
And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together.
The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.
Any argument that environmentalists run amok is the sole cause of nuclear's failure to launch has to address the fact that these two places, where environmentalists are a lot more likely to get a club to the head than a say at the table, are largely not expanding their nuclear power that much versus, say, solar in China.
China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities…
…and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.
China has some coal reserves but overall they're a major net fossil fuel importer. They're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk which is why they've been rapidly electrifying their economy and building solar, nuclear, and hydro power plants (along with coal fired power plants).
Maybe emissions fell because industrial activity fell instead? Maybe oil and gas have been used less because the cost has risen. Maybe that explains coal as well depending on how it is used. I’m speculating coal might be used in the production of steel - what if that product is highly tariffed in the US and EU so China had to cut back?
China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal. If it was they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
> China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal
Why does the "why" matter? Tons of carbon are tons of carbon, right? That's what people say when you tell them about per-capita emissions.
> they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled.
What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
You can see the same dips hit at the same time for the same reason.
In terms of Chinese coal though there's a reason boosters always talk about percentages and not absolute number... one goes down, but the other keeps rising. Even if China continues on the current course in terms of tonnage burned they won't reach "peak coal" until at least 2030.
> After the first three quarters of the year, China’s CO2 emissions in 2025 are now finely balanced between a small fall or rise, depending on what happens in the last quarter.
And then goes on to describe how the largest drop (3%) is happening at a time when it just happens that fuel is increasingly expensive and scarce, shipping is increasingly expensive and slow, and the global economy has spent months grinding increasingly towards a terrible outcome.
People might as well brag about their incredible weight loss journey through amputation.
China can be going green while also refusing to constrain it's economic growth on the short term.
When you actually build things, throwing up a coal plant for 10 years because you need it while you grow your solar and battery industries or wait for reactors to cover your base load is just sensible.
All narratives about China always have this static world baked into them: "they're currently like this, and that's all they'll ever be". But China develops fast. Shenzhen was a farming village by a ditch. 10 years ago buying a Chinese car was inconceivable - I took delivery on one yesterday, etc.
At some point in the very near future China is going to hit a cross over point on their emissions and they'll start falling fast because reactors + renewables will be building out fast enough they'll want the coal plants gone - no one likes ruling over a polluted wasteland.
Edit: it can also be the case that they don't care at all about going green...but renewable energy technology is the most sovereign possible energy security. No one can take away your access to the sun.
People who know how much effort it takes to constantly measure and contain radioactivity and what a mess it is to mine for Uranium in the first place also don't wonder.
I believe burning coal realease far more Uranium and radioactive material than nuclear ever did.
Listing the plane crashes over the last century wont buldge the statistics of the safety of this mean of transportation.
Did I imply anywhere anyhow that I am a fan of coal?
I just don't think it is a good idea to replace something dirty with something else dirty that is indeed quite safe if all goes well, but is horrible if something goes wrong.
Italy has lot's of sun and wind (and geothermal potential).
Everything is a comparison to what exists, not your dreams. The alternative to coal today isn't just renewables, and thinking in those absolute terms is in large part what's handed the fossil fuel lobby decades of default victories.
We don't have time for perfect solution, do all of what you said AND THEN ALSO MORE.
Oh, I know and am in favor of shutting coal down asap and before nuclear. But you seem to imply handling radioactivity is not a big problem compared to fossils, but I believe it is, considering how faulty and corrupt individual humans are, or corporations or government bodies doing the oversight.
China also? How is that? China is a big importer of oil, and is heavily burning coal (more than 50% their energy mix), that is also partly imported. They are fighting for a cleaner energy not because they are green but because they don't want to be dependent on imports, and some people even accuse them of undercutting solar panel pricing to get all the world market.
They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being built is in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia, Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power.
You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.
If china that is the number one producer of solar panels and batteries is investing in nuclear perhaps that shows that indeed it's not such a bad bet? Specially taking into account the military applications of such capabilities.
It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?)
It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?
Coal's share of electricity production in China fell below 50% in 2026 for the first time ever. This is despite idling nat gas plants due to the war in Iran messing up shipments.
Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.
Most electricity and infrastructure is profitable. But not after carving it out in a way that looks at it in complete isolation. Just like train infrastructure creates a lot of business around the area of the train infrastructure, even if the train itself may seem not self sustained.
Sure, but then that's not "profitable" in the direct sense of "makes rich oligarchs richer".
I'm all for improving the quality of life for society. In the end the goal is to live well, not to destroy our living conditions for a few oligarchs to make more money. But "profitability" is not generally optimised like this, unfortunately.
I'm fairly sure that the total economic value that we get out of roads far exceeds the cost it takes to create and maintain them, yes. A similar argument can probably be made for justice systems and armies.
If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful. I think that's what we're talking about here.
I think that for your analogy to work, you also need to consider the total economic value that we get out of electricity as opposed to just revenue from electricity bills...?
Notice how for roads you compare the total economic value of all roads against the cost of them. But for electricity you compare a single power generation system. You are not comparing the same thing. A fair comparison would be the total economic value of having electricity against the cost of all electricity infrastructure. Sadly this fair comparison is irrelevant in this thread.
If every government had subsidized and pushed forward a transition to ~100% nuclear power back in the 70s it would have effectively solved climate change. Electricity, industry and heat production account for >50% of CO2 production.
Then there's all the other effects of not having a high demand for hydrocarbons including less Middle East entanglement, less mining and drilling, more abundant and cheaper oil for uses other than burning it, etc.
Why would we choose a more expensive form of energy rather than cheaper forms?
There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.
Batteries and solar and wind are a lot cheaper, faster to deploy, and scale a ton better.
Nuclear is far too slow to solve our emissions problems, there's no chance of us being able to scale the nuclear industry to be able to confront climate change on the time scale necessary.
In contrast, batteries, solar, and wind are scaling on their own, without the massive government subsidies that would be needed to deliver nuclear too late to help.
Those things you pay for indirectly via taxes. Electricity you pay for directly. you can build unprofitable economically uncompetitive power, like nukes, and your rates will go up. People tend not to like that, but you can do it.
So the alternative is relying on solar panels made by a quasi-hostile country, because for some reason we can't produce them economically ourselves, or continuing to burn fossil fuels?
Countries just can pretty easily make solar economically themselves, it’s no great secret. But they don’t because china makes them a bit cheaper , you keep them forever and we’re not in a war. You think all the billions of parts and steel in a nuke will all be locally built too? For eg Go look up who owns almost all the foundries in the world that are required to build large pressure vessels for reactors.
So, option a sounds great to me, but you clearly have some kind of agenda here, that maybe you could make clearer
Not sure about profitable but the lower the cost is the generate electricity, the better off the world will be. Cracking energy is, to state the obvious, a huge unlock.
That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.
In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.
In most sunny places a decentralized per-home solar policy is cheap, sustainable, and more robust to severe local weather events.
While fission reactors are still the cheaper initial energy choice (like a future cancer patients love of cheap cigarettes.) Small Modular reactors are a fools errand for most places, as they have all the same security, labor, and maintenance issues of full sized installations. Thus, instead of repairing one of four turbines every few years, the contaminated components must now be reprocessed or safely hidden away on mass.
Maybe fine for submarines or aircraft carriers, but for massive infrastructure it is trivial to prove it causes major long-term problems.
Anyone that has ever purchased a property with an old leaky heating-oil tank nasty surprise site-reclamation cost... will understand the initial unit price never covers the actual clean up cost. =3
Given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and that the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 fleet are ruinously expensive France is unable to build competitive new nuclear.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Look up Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, it was 14 years late and (depending on whose figures you believe) cost nearly 10x more than the original estimate of €3 billion, bankrupting Areva in the process.
The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind.
As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?
Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?
It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.
We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.
Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:
They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.
Gotcha - yea I think it’s a good idea to try out these things.
I just hope it doesn’t become a ideological fight to make something work at any cost to fit a certain narrative (same goes for renewables of course)
The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel.
What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power.
I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output.
Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.
I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays.
Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh
It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
Is there something unique to Italy that makes it an intractable problem? Where I live we've been able to shift a huge amount of our fossil fuels over to batteries in a relatively short time. It's nice that nuclear has power production 24/7 but it seems unnecessary when there's already a glut during the daytime
The fact that nuclear is good at the easy part of power production is not a point in favor of nuclear. Grids are built to peak needs; any grid that can handle peak load can handle base load.
Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.
I don’t know why commenters here are treating energy technologies as winner-takes-all. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and that’s fantastic news for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it suits every country, every niche, and every application. There are plenty of places that don’t have massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather. Even if nuclear isn’t ever the cheapest option, the world energy market is so huge and diverse that it still makes sense to have nuclear as an option.
>massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather.
Italy has all that right across the pond.
And no energy source can beat solar on the speed of build out. And when it comes to the energy the next few years is all about build out [for AI]. Countries who get it right - like China, look at their solar and new datacenters getting powered by it, may be US if the required thinking wins - are going to lead the world in the near to mid-term future, the rest are going to be struggling seconds.
>Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build.
>The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved.
Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.
I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?
I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.
Still doesn't make sense. We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Radioactive material and a bit of water.. there's no reason to design those things a hundred times. France actually did that.
France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. As for floating SMBs in the harbour, I don't think climate change will be kind to this idea.
We were still learning about flaws and failure modes of nuclear reactors. Designs kept evolving to try to address these. We never got to the passenger airliner model where we had systematically eliminated nearly every failure mode and could produce this on an assembly line.
> We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.
Now, whether the market for any of these SMR reactors is large enough that any of them will be able to see any of these supposed economies of scale is a big question.
At least these installations don't need to deal with radioactive material directly, so they will have the same financial infact as similar improvements to, say, coal-fired power plants.
They don't materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant. Cooling towers or evaporating ponds are not expensive. Coal and gas power plants also use them.
You just can't easily retrofit them onto an _existing_ power plant.
You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.
Single family homes are very much standardized. You get doors in one of 6 widths (IIRC), and they are all the same height (closet doors are a different height, but otherwise standard). You get windows in a few dozen sizes. You get your wall studs in one of two lengths. And so on.
There is a lot of variation of layout possible within the constraints of the standard. However the vast majority of the hard work is done in a factory to standard sizes, and the onsite work is just final assembly to easy to change specs, so there would be no advantage to a standard.
New suburb housing developments in North America typically use a handful of floorplans that are customized very slightly across many homes specifically so they don’t need hundreds of unique designs
Also the majority of changes someone might want with stud frame construction are simple and require 10 seconds of drawing to show the framer.
The whole point of stud frame construction is that you can do basically whatever you want because it is overbuilt and all the connections and joints simple.
Right. So why don’t we see residential construction costs fall with this standardization? Because wright’s law / economies of scale don’t work when you are doing all the assembly on site.
It will reliably cost only 10x, and it theory it will roll of a production line.
The AP1000 reactors at Vogtle were explicitly marked for the modular construction as a key selling feature, which would reduce time and cost. It came out 20B over budget and 7 years late.
It's a great story: in theory you can produce modular components of a full scale nuclear power plant in a controlled environment. In theory.
In practice the production line wasn't as controlled as it needed to be and ended up delivering modules that needed significant rework. That caused modules to be delivered and ready out of order. In other words they bought a lot of project management complexity that was hidden behind the theory of modularity.
SMRs are turning out to be even more expensive than conventional nuclear power plants, which are so expensive compared to renewables that even without a risk premium they are uncompetitive.
Vogtle, Hinkley Point C- are all one off constructions and have very expensive regulatory compliance requirements
AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range.
Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did.
Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.
Are we prepared to play kingmaker and pick one SMR design to standardize on so that those can ride their theoretical learning curve (assuming we get enough buyers)? Because politically that doesn't seem likely, and I think we'll end up with the units that do get contracted to be spread across multiple firms, none of which make it out of the expensive first few units.
> Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C
Per wikipedia: initial cost estimate €3.3 billion, cost in 2020 (6 years before it was done) €19.1 billion, so 5.8x the budget. Supposed to enter operation in 2012, entered in 2026 "only" 14 years late.
These are terrible results.
That EPR2 series are "expected" to cost less says absolutely nothing. Flameville 3 was expected to cost 83% less too, and I except that if they swindle people for the money to build it we'll see it'll be just as much of an overrun.
The nuclear industry seem absolutely incapable of sticking to a timeline or budget. And any one of these failures should have been disqualifying. But they get to do it over and over again.
That is why even Flameville 3 was cheaper than Hinkley point C, not that it was cheap.
Flameville 3 is the first reactor for France in 21st century and suffers the frequency problem I am arguing. It was a path finder therefore only one was ever ordered. EPR2 is 6 under construction and France does have a track record of doing it consistently at scale for cheap(by nuclear standards).
The Asian giants all do it for cheaper because they build regularly, Japan (post Fukushima policy direction notwithstanding) and South Korea achieve overnight numbers of $5-6M/MW or less, so does China.
Regular construction is key, to the industry having a chance, without SMR that is never realistic anymore.
The most annoying thing about Hinkley Point C is that after all the delays and investments, the electricity it generates won’t even be cheap. £133/MWh!
Right now we have politicians arguing that a £90/MWh strike price for offshore wind - where the construction of the wind dawn is entirely encapsulated by the strike price - is expensive.
Overnight costs do not get impacted by guaranteed purchase price or subsidy for it neither does it include interest rates. It is a specific aspect of the TCO.
Nobody is saying nuclear is cheap it is not - we will be building a plant once in while for pure strategic reason no matter the cost anyway. The point is construction cost comes down per MW with higher frequency of plant building, and this is the case SMRs, we can get cheaper construction both Per MW and overall TCO in absolute dollar terms relative to large plants with SMRs.
There is no economic case for SMR that you couldn't make for a larger one with a massive benefit of economies of scale. SMRs are - in my opinion - a dead end, larger reactors could work well but will be delivered later and likely will still not be profitable on a KWh basis when compared to an equivalent installed base of solar and wind and will most likely be deliver much, much later.
Wright’s law is the only way to reduce costs. It’s a generalization of Moore’s law. The more of anything you build the cheaper it gets. Most products get 10% - 20% cheaper every time total production volume doubles. The most obvious example right now is rockets - launch costs are going down exponentially because we (SpaceX mostly) are doing so much of it we are finally getting economies of scale. SMRs will too, but only if they become popular. It’s a little bit of chicken and egg, but the economics are clear. If lots of people start using SMRs they WILL get cheap. And it’s a form factor where it’s plausible lots of people will.
That's another interesting theory, but Wright's law doesn't mitigate many other disadvantages of SMRs: the need for multi site security; the need for on-site technicians at more sites; the need to build grid hook up to more locations, etc. There's a reason reactors grew to a certain size, no smaller and no bigger. Ignoring that lesson has a high price.
Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels.
In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.
This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.
I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.
It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?
It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.
This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.
> Wind and solar overtaking fossil fuels in 2025 can be largely attributed to a staggering rise in solar power. Solar grew by more than a fifth (+20.1%) for the fourth year running. It generated a record 13% of EU power in 2025, above both coal and hydro. This trend was widespread: all EU countries saw growth in solar generation compared to the year before, amid a huge expansion in EU solar installations. Solar provided more than a fifth of electricity in Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands. Renewables provided nearly half of EU power (48%) as unusual weather conditions caused hydro generation to fall by 12% and wind by 2%, but boosted solar generation. Wind remained the second largest EU electricity source at 17% of EU power, generating more than gas. Signs of a structural shift are clear across the EU, as wind and solar generated more electricity than all fossil sources in 14 of the 27 EU countries in 2025. Over the past five years, wind and solar have experienced massive growth (from 20% in 2020 to 30% in 2025). Fossil fuels have fallen from 37% to 29% in the same period, while hydro and nuclear remained stable or slightly declined.
> certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, and it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. Once the power plant is built, it provides 50+ years of nearly free energy. It's that or buying gas from Russia.
> it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.
The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).
So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.
Nuclear fuel rods get used for 1-2 years before they need to be replaced. This is much longer than it takes to burn a shipload of liquefied natural gas, though it's much shorter than it takes for solar panels or grid scale batteries to need replacement. Both nuclear energy and renewable energy are less sensitive to supply shocks than fossil energy, even if Europe doesn't reduce the percentage of its energy needs that depend on imports.
It would cost a bit more is the worst case if you had to build your own centerfuges, uranium is not all that rare. And a single ship could carry a decades worth of fuel (not that I recommend a decade of fuel on a single ship), so even if shipping was costly it would be cheap compared to the actual fuel refinement. You couldn't Hormuz a uranium fuel supply because it doesn't take thousands of ships or miles of pipeline to deliver.
So maybe not worry free, but if you are able to run nuclear reactors for power to start with, obtaining fuel for them in any scenario shouldn't be impossible. You got atleast a year or two lead time between refuelings, and it might be able to be stretched a little longer in an emergency. And even more time if you hold some in reserve.
Australia and Canada are top producers of uranium ore, and uranium ore is a small fraction of total lifecycle costs. Given a ~2 year refuelling cycle and the possibility of stockpiling uranium, this is very far from an interruption to oil and gas flows - which you need a continuous supply of. Security isn't just a function of autarkic raw material supplies.
>Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,
That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.
The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.
Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
>t's that or buying gas from Russia.
Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.
And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?
Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.
It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.
To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.
Conspiracy hat time: I think this is the main reason it's being pushed so hard. The US and Russia feel threatened by the rise of renewables and will do anything to get countries dependent on them again.
> Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment
... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
> It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.
People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.
That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.
My argument was that while waiting for renewables to become cheap, we could have built nuclear instead of fossil capacity and avoided a shitton of emissions. The Messmer plan being an existence proof that such a thing would have been possible.
We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.
I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
> I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
I mean, you need to radiation-harden your structural materials and electronics for both fission and fusion, and some hypothetical antimatter reactor is probably using an evolutionary version of EM confinement techniques from fusion.
But, yes, fission reactors are ultimately kind of ooga-booga (put a pile of metal in some water and run a steam engine) that's hard to characterize as on track for something sci-fi like an antimatter reactor.
Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.
Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
> The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
My mom is in her mid 70s and grew up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a child in Bangladesh. She still imagines a Star Trek future is inevitable. If anything it’s Gen Z that has a small and narrow vision of what’s possible.
You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards.
It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged.
I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity.
You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.
Your theory is contrary to the evidence of history. Technological progress makes people more free, not less. 500 years ago, you would have been a serf and your life would be literally worthless. In much of the undeveloped world, that’s still true.
What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?
Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.
I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.
Nuclear power plants are uninsurable in the private market. There is no natural investor base for a product that is uninsurable. Unless you are an imagining a culture war where real capitalists are fighting corporate welfare queens, it's not a culture war issue.
Time and demographics are also a component. Italy is old, has worker shortages for living wage work (and is currently issuing ~500k work visas over three years to attract labor to the market), and a new nuclear generator takes at least ten years to build. Each year, an additional 1TW of solar will be deployed globally. Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled.
> 49% of Italy’s electricity was generated from low-carbon sources in 2025, below the EU average of 71%. As of 1 January 2026, Italy was aiming for 69% of renewable electricity generation by 2030. For the country’s latest renewables targets, see our 2030 Global Renewable Target Tracker.
Record 2026 summer heat impaired nuclear generation in France, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, so I'd be curious how they intend to solve for that as the climate continues to warm (reduced capacity factor from reduced output due to cooling constraints impairs the economics).
That's about half of the average cost right [1], so literally it will make electricity cheaper. Also, it will be cost that will not go up willy nilly when someone decides to do something absolutely stupid
Hopefully Germany will follow next. It’s absurd that they rely on fossil fuel and coal when they can build modern nuclear plants that can provide stable energy for the energy heavy industries.
It would take 5-10 years to build the power plants and maybe with Chinese aid even faster
I don't think that nuclear projects of any size could pass current environmental impact assessments.
Only a severe energy shortage could motivate politicians enough to temporarily skip these, like they did for the LNG terminals. But you can't build a nuclear power plant of any size within a single legislative period so its just not going to happen.
Fun fact: in the 60s Italy was after the US and UK the county with the most advanced nuclear energy plants. These days still North Italy produces key parts of nuclear reactors in other countries.
I wonder how much of a factor is that nuclear plants are effectively "unbombable". Ukraine's thermal plants have taken a beating, but their nuclear plants are still generating.
This is somewhat strange. Italy has a lot of sun, and a lot of mountains for these pumped storage hydropower plants. It is way harder to store output from PV on Great European Plain.
Has there been a single SMR deployed and working yet? There were lots of talk about GE BWRX-300 and Rolls Royce SMR but none of them seems to have even started construction.
As an Italian, I know exactly how this playbook plays out.
Nuclear energy is a big business for intimates friends, so on the trend that it's a green tech (apparently no carbn footprint, but what about the depleted fuel?) they approved the reopening of this technology.
Why going for SMR?
Well, it's the penalties business model and SMR is ideal because they are on paper, no valid proven commercial implementation.
A company wins the contract, in this case i'm not sure if they'll go for a open bid, the contract include research, design, building and so on. At some point the political wind changes, contract canceled and hundreds of milions in contractual penalties to pay. It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends, with zero obligation to ever break ground.
It's from 19th century that they are thinking about a bridge between Sicily and mainland. The last time the project was revived, the playbook went exactly as described above: years of studies, cancellation and massive state penalties paid out to contractors for a bridge that still doesn't exist (Sicily and mainland are on different tectonic plates).
No mention there is no national deposit for nuclear waste, especially in a highly sismic territory.
>It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends,
I agree completely and would go so far as to claim that presently in 2026 that money-transfer mechanism is the real motivation for any nuclear project in any country. Renewable options are the better path now from a technical point, but politicians and their buddies can't easily make as much money from that.
"I'm virtue signaling because I'm Pro nuclear yes it's a luxury belief you're promoting something nuclear power is a luxury belief you heard it here first because they're going to put these things in poor communities and so it's never going to affect your life they're putting them next to Data Center in like Oregon like it's easy for you to say oh I support nuclear look how Progressive I am look how smart I am you haven't internalized the downsides [...]"
It doesn't work that way in Italy. A popular referendum can only abolish an existing law, partially or fully. The general public cannot vote to adopt new legislation.
I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.
I just don't get people saying how terrible climate change is going to be for the world and then refuses to support nuclear.
If climate change is such a critical problem, then let's try everything to get this solved even if it costs more to do it. If you are only willing to do some solutions because it is cheaper then I don't believe you when you say it is important to solve.
And frankly, we don't know the full impact of climate change, so having as many alternatives as possible just makes sense. Hydro can be impacted by droughts which will be more common. Solar may be impacted if there are increased storms. Wind may be impacted due to stilling (slowing of wind due to an increase in co2).
Why not throw nuclear into the mix to ensure we do not run out of power?
Always funny to see how plutonium pilled hn is. Nuclear power in Italy is idiotic. They won't even be able to cool the damn reactors. Europe is drying out.
I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?
Nuclear has several major cost problems if it's own. Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive, the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions. The list goes on. Basically:
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
Then why is the insurance for every single reactor public sector based?
Are you saying that plutonium isn't nearly as poisonous as people claim, and watching for hairline cracks in containment walls is a waste of time?
Or something like that?
Yeah, let's not forget defence budgets that are spent to prop up oil availability too.
War would be so much harder w/o oil, yet we fight wars for oil. Hmmm.
That... doesn't seem true?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.
Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.
He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.
None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.
If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.
But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.
The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.
[0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and...
This must at least partly be region-dependent right?
In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).
From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?
This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever
To be fair South Australia is:
* Incredibly sunny
* Incredibly sparely populated
* Functionally winterless
Like it's the perfect setup for solar.
Somewhere like Denmark, Japan, even the US Northeast does not have those.
Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!
There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.
Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.
Yes, thank you. Eroi ist the only thing which matters from a hard physics stand point.
That’s just not true.
An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
30 years is generally the guarantee for some minimum output so it's the floor too... could still be outputting 60-70% of original spec for 50 years
It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.
Profit is not everything.
> That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
Spot on. That, plus... peak oil.
Peak oil was supposed to have happened decades ago but current projections put it well past 2050. Demand for oil is going to fall due to electrification long before we run out of sufficient oil production capacity.
It is clear at this point that peak oil was another failed Malthusian projection. I don't think peak oil is guiding much national policy aside from the national security aspects.
Yes. There's all kind of hydrocarbons that aren't economic or barely so, like oil shale or shale oil, with is rock with a stain on it.
Interestingly, Venezuelan extra heavy sour crude oil is not profitable to use at $55 a barrel, the price before the Iran war, but is profitable when it's over $90 a barrel.
It's easy to make money when someone else pays the costs but you get to keep the revenue.
This is wrong. The peak of conventional oil is documented around 2007. Since then, Europe's economy has been slowing down (if you look at physical indicators like how much is transported by trucks or what surface is being built each year, not artificial ones like the GDP).
Global peak is estimated to be around now (a few years ago maybe?).
why is profit the right descriptor?
wouldnt you instead count the net benefits to the whole economy from having that cheap and plentiful electricity?
But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
Plenty of uranium available from Canada, Australia, and Namibia
FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too
has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it
Even in Spain we have Uranium, but the politicians made it illegal to mine it, lol (I wanna cry)
Why? Isn’t it in the national interest of a government to preferentially use foreign sources of uranium to preserve domestic sources?
It should be in the national interest. But every nation is determined to let Russia have the last resources in 30 years by boycotting Russian oil and gas.
As we hear downthread though, we'll have warp drives by then.
there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision
Mining isn't a great argument against nuclear. Uranium fuel has an incredibly high energy density so a relatively small amount of high grade ore can be converted into a large amount of electricity so even when compared to the one time input from mining required to produce all of the components that go into making a PV installation it can still perform favourably. Uranium mining is also transitioning away from open pit mines to using in-situ recovery where a liquid solution is injected into a uranium ore formation to dissolve the uranium before recovering the solution, about 55% of current uranium production uses this method already.
Mining uranium in Spain would destroy environment and involve legal slavery?
Slavery is obviously not an issue in a country like Spain, but any kind of mining operation here seems to be heavily opposed by the people that live around the potential sites, for environmental reasons.
Nuclear fuel is available from lots of countries, including Canada and Australia, plus deposits in Europe that aren't being minted because uranium is very cheap.
Plus you can stockpile it super easy.
Wrong uranium you can easily stock for 10years inadvance
Maybe don't keep it all in one spot, though.
Nuclear power plants refuel on yearly cycles.
That's plenty of time to source alternative uranium supplies presuming you haven't stockpiled.
Plus: Australia has an absolute ton of the stuff.
>I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable.
This is comparing to the base case of fossil fuels. But those have tremendous negative consequences.
Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).
The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.
Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.
- https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nucl...
- https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/epr-d...
Until the rivers run low.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...
> Nuclear plants along the Danube river in Hungary and Romania were forced to cut output this week and could be shut down completely in the coming days due to record low water levels.
Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
> The reliability of french electricity
Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.
Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.
So many reactors off was a special event of delayed maintenance, things are done so that does not usually happens. And it's not true to say that Germany reactivated coal reactors for French lights.
Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.
That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable
Off topic, but this guy on youtube is a knowledgeable (pro-nuke) resource.
https://www.youtube.com/@tfolsenuclear
I am not sure what you mean by profitable here?
Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?
Power is an input. If it isn’t profitable it needs to be subsidized from elsewhere.
Healthcare is the same. It just turns out subsidizing it from wages works because healthy people are more productive.
Profitability isn’t a hard limit. But if something isn’t internally profitable, it requires an external partner to get going.
Because for power creation there are alternatives, but for healthcare there aren't. Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue. Ideally we could use land currently dedicated to energy crops to install solar panels that operate at a significantly higher efficiency.
Many countries do not have the raw materials to build solar, wind turbines, and batteries so it doesn't solve the sovereignty issue.
An awful lot more countries in the world have the potential to sovereign manufacture relatively simple renewables than the massive engineering in reactors
That's like saying oil-producing countries aren't sovereign unless they also manufacture oil drills and pumps and pipes and tanks.
The sun is an oil well. Panels are drills or pumps. Batteries are oil tanks.
Not having oil drill and oil tank factories in your country isn't a critical energy sovereignty issue.
Once you have a solar panel you can't be cut off from using it. It's not like oil where you need regular deliveries forever.
Sure, but when your existing ones break or you need more you can have issues.
> when your existing ones break
They last 25 years. Enough time to spin up domestic manufacturing if you're really paranoid.
> or you need more
Lots of countries manufacture them today.
Because for healthcare profit isn't a motive to begin with (or at least, it shouldn't be) and there aren't many different alternative sources for it either.
Neither it is for nuclear. It fixes the externality
Healthcare is profitable like schools are, or roads, or public transportation, or sanitary systems: the goal is for us a society to live better.
When something is profitable in the sense that a few oligarchs make more an more money, I see it as a bug, not a feature.
And in a society that hasn’t made health care profitable (Italy), I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.
In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.
There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.
I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.
I had an non urgent injury in Spain last week. Went to A&E and was seen by a doctor, x-rayed, and given advice and the results within 90 minutes. I paid zero euros for that on top of my taxes. Maybe it's an Italian problem... And for sure Spain has its own issues as well, but private is not always necessarily better.
I've lived in Spain a couple years ago. I've seen the quality of its health care. Its easily 20 years behind the US and that's being charitable. The family that lived next to me had a man who had the exact same break I had had 20 years before. He had worse, more primitive care than I did in the US decades before. I had to explain to them why it was a bad idea for him to sit in his wheelchair all day because nobody in the Spanish system seemed to know how to care for a simple broken leg. You got what you paid for...
PS Spanish taxes are absurdly high...insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries. All that and an actual working economy and energy system.
Sometimes it works — but the overall quality, speed, and care outcomes remain, on average, very poor when compared to the US.
The price is only good if you ignore the outcomes and what you’re paying on the backend through taxes.
>I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries
I actually do since I'm Italian lol
Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant
This was at the Ospedale San Carlo di Nancy in Rome.
Understood, never had to deal with healthcare in Lazio region
> I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.
> In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance
The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
You lost any credibility with the $5000 comment. You have no idea how the american system works and I'm not even american. Your snarky tone is absolutely disgusting, I would love for you to receive the same answer when talking about some health issue caused by terrible healthcare.
Terminally online people like you who lose all empathy when something they believe in is criticized are very funny and sad at the same time.
A broken limb, fractured elbow, deep cuts/lacerations/abrasions on my legs, elbow, and arms. I was in pain, my wounds were filled with gravel and dirt, and I just closed my eyes and laid on the floor and disassociated for twelve fucking hours. My girlfriend was losing her shit trying to advocate for me.
Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff’s incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes.
My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards.
Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged.
> The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own.
And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together.
The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.
Yes, while we’re looking at expenses, add the military to oil.
This is wrong, Germanies Konvoi where immensely profitable. The greens complained about these as money printing machines.
What exactly does it mean for a powerplan in china or russia to be profitable?
The same thing it means anywhere else?
Any argument that environmentalists run amok is the sole cause of nuclear's failure to launch has to address the fact that these two places, where environmentalists are a lot more likely to get a club to the head than a say at the table, are largely not expanding their nuclear power that much versus, say, solar in China.
China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities…
…and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.
China has some coal reserves but overall they're a major net fossil fuel importer. They're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk which is why they've been rapidly electrifying their economy and building solar, nuclear, and hydro power plants (along with coal fired power plants).
They’ve been building out every form of power generation they can. Nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. It’s all skyrocketing.
The talking point that they’re going green doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-producti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
That link is out of date. China's coal share fell under 50% this year (your link says 58%), and their CO2 emissions dropped 1% the first half of 2026.
So yes, it can be reasonably claimed that China is greening. "greening", not "green" -- 49.7% coal is still a lot of CO2.
https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/china-pushes-coal-...
Maybe emissions fell because industrial activity fell instead? Maybe oil and gas have been used less because the cost has risen. Maybe that explains coal as well depending on how it is used. I’m speculating coal might be used in the production of steel - what if that product is highly tariffed in the US and EU so China had to cut back?
China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal. If it was they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
> China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal
Why does the "why" matter? Tons of carbon are tons of carbon, right? That's what people say when you tell them about per-capita emissions.
> they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled.
What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
Oh you're correct, the same thing is happening in India without any of the nonsense fanfare.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/span-...
You can see the same dips hit at the same time for the same reason.
In terms of Chinese coal though there's a reason boosters always talk about percentages and not absolute number... one goes down, but the other keeps rising. Even if China continues on the current course in terms of tonnage burned they won't reach "peak coal" until at least 2030.
To add to this, China’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have been flat or declining for a couple of years now: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
Your own link says the following:
> After the first three quarters of the year, China’s CO2 emissions in 2025 are now finely balanced between a small fall or rise, depending on what happens in the last quarter.
And then goes on to describe how the largest drop (3%) is happening at a time when it just happens that fuel is increasingly expensive and scarce, shipping is increasingly expensive and slow, and the global economy has spent months grinding increasingly towards a terrible outcome.
People might as well brag about their incredible weight loss journey through amputation.
Fossil is flat or declining. Everything else is skyrocketing.
I never claimed that China is "going green" (whatever that means), merely that they're gradually reducing their dependence on imported fossil fuels.
China can be going green while also refusing to constrain it's economic growth on the short term.
When you actually build things, throwing up a coal plant for 10 years because you need it while you grow your solar and battery industries or wait for reactors to cover your base load is just sensible.
All narratives about China always have this static world baked into them: "they're currently like this, and that's all they'll ever be". But China develops fast. Shenzhen was a farming village by a ditch. 10 years ago buying a Chinese car was inconceivable - I took delivery on one yesterday, etc.
At some point in the very near future China is going to hit a cross over point on their emissions and they'll start falling fast because reactors + renewables will be building out fast enough they'll want the coal plants gone - no one likes ruling over a polluted wasteland.
Edit: it can also be the case that they don't care at all about going green...but renewable energy technology is the most sovereign possible energy security. No one can take away your access to the sun.
People who know how much effort it takes to constantly measure and contain radioactivity and what a mess it is to mine for Uranium in the first place also don't wonder.
If not, reading a list of this helps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
But sure, oil leaks can be bad as well. Solar leaks on the other hand seem bearable.
I believe burning coal realease far more Uranium and radioactive material than nuclear ever did. Listing the plane crashes over the last century wont buldge the statistics of the safety of this mean of transportation.
Did I imply anywhere anyhow that I am a fan of coal?
I just don't think it is a good idea to replace something dirty with something else dirty that is indeed quite safe if all goes well, but is horrible if something goes wrong.
Italy has lot's of sun and wind (and geothermal potential).
Everything is a comparison to what exists, not your dreams. The alternative to coal today isn't just renewables, and thinking in those absolute terms is in large part what's handed the fossil fuel lobby decades of default victories.
We don't have time for perfect solution, do all of what you said AND THEN ALSO MORE.
I am someone who knows, hence my disgust. Time to learn about the radioactivity of coal fly ash and how carefully that’s managed.
Oh, I know and am in favor of shutting coal down asap and before nuclear. But you seem to imply handling radioactivity is not a big problem compared to fossils, but I believe it is, considering how faulty and corrupt individual humans are, or corporations or government bodies doing the oversight.
China also? How is that? China is a big importer of oil, and is heavily burning coal (more than 50% their energy mix), that is also partly imported. They are fighting for a cleaner energy not because they are green but because they don't want to be dependent on imports, and some people even accuse them of undercutting solar panel pricing to get all the world market.
They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being built is in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia, Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power.
You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.
If china that is the number one producer of solar panels and batteries is investing in nuclear perhaps that shows that indeed it's not such a bad bet? Specially taking into account the military applications of such capabilities.
It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?)
It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?
Coal's share of electricity production in China fell below 50% in 2026 for the first time ever. This is despite idling nat gas plants due to the war in Iran messing up shipments.
Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.
Why does electricity need to be profitable? Are roads, justice systems, or armies profitable?
Most electricity and infrastructure is profitable. But not after carving it out in a way that looks at it in complete isolation. Just like train infrastructure creates a lot of business around the area of the train infrastructure, even if the train itself may seem not self sustained.
Sure, but then that's not "profitable" in the direct sense of "makes rich oligarchs richer".
I'm all for improving the quality of life for society. In the end the goal is to live well, not to destroy our living conditions for a few oligarchs to make more money. But "profitability" is not generally optimised like this, unfortunately.
I'm fairly sure that the total economic value that we get out of roads far exceeds the cost it takes to create and maintain them, yes. A similar argument can probably be made for justice systems and armies.
If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful. I think that's what we're talking about here.
I think that for your analogy to work, you also need to consider the total economic value that we get out of electricity as opposed to just revenue from electricity bills...?
> If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful.
There is more than money. There is stability (not depending on foreign oil, peak oil, etc), there is climate change, etc.
Notice how for roads you compare the total economic value of all roads against the cost of them. But for electricity you compare a single power generation system. You are not comparing the same thing. A fair comparison would be the total economic value of having electricity against the cost of all electricity infrastructure. Sadly this fair comparison is irrelevant in this thread.
If every government had subsidized and pushed forward a transition to ~100% nuclear power back in the 70s it would have effectively solved climate change. Electricity, industry and heat production account for >50% of CO2 production.
Then there's all the other effects of not having a high demand for hydrocarbons including less Middle East entanglement, less mining and drilling, more abundant and cheaper oil for uses other than burning it, etc.
Why would we choose a more expensive form of energy rather than cheaper forms?
There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.
Emissions.
Batteries and solar and wind are a lot cheaper, faster to deploy, and scale a ton better.
Nuclear is far too slow to solve our emissions problems, there's no chance of us being able to scale the nuclear industry to be able to confront climate change on the time scale necessary.
In contrast, batteries, solar, and wind are scaling on their own, without the massive government subsidies that would be needed to deliver nuclear too late to help.
It does not. But there are so many sources that can be. And easily at that. So why go this route?
A lot of countries consider energy security national security, and national security always bats last.
A lot of countries also use it to help subsidize (or help cover up the costs of) their military nuclear programs.
That's just not true. Event is PWR reactors take their root in the nuclear program for plutonium generation, that's not the case anymore.
Those things you pay for indirectly via taxes. Electricity you pay for directly. you can build unprofitable economically uncompetitive power, like nukes, and your rates will go up. People tend not to like that, but you can do it.
So the alternative is relying on solar panels made by a quasi-hostile country, because for some reason we can't produce them economically ourselves, or continuing to burn fossil fuels?
Countries just can pretty easily make solar economically themselves, it’s no great secret. But they don’t because china makes them a bit cheaper , you keep them forever and we’re not in a war. You think all the billions of parts and steel in a nuke will all be locally built too? For eg Go look up who owns almost all the foundries in the world that are required to build large pressure vessels for reactors.
So, option a sounds great to me, but you clearly have some kind of agenda here, that maybe you could make clearer
Not sure about profitable but the lower the cost is the generate electricity, the better off the world will be. Cracking energy is, to state the obvious, a huge unlock.
Because in their wisdom the politicians have created energy markets.
The costs for generating electricity needs to be paid for somehow.
Having the consumers of the electricity pay for has a lot of advantages!
Are fossil fuels net profitable after subsidies, wars, and externalities are considered?
Oh boy, they are sooooo profitable that there are wars around them.
We’re at the point now where this has to be a problem for the future.
Treat power plants as public infrastructure. No need for high returns or insurance of every risk.
That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.
In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.
Do you mean nuclear isn't profitable compared to coal, whose costs are externalized, or compared to other renewables?
In most sunny places a decentralized per-home solar policy is cheap, sustainable, and more robust to severe local weather events.
While fission reactors are still the cheaper initial energy choice (like a future cancer patients love of cheap cigarettes.) Small Modular reactors are a fools errand for most places, as they have all the same security, labor, and maintenance issues of full sized installations. Thus, instead of repairing one of four turbines every few years, the contaminated components must now be reprocessed or safely hidden away on mass.
Maybe fine for submarines or aircraft carriers, but for massive infrastructure it is trivial to prove it causes major long-term problems.
Anyone that has ever purchased a property with an old leaky heating-oil tank nasty surprise site-reclamation cost... will understand the initial unit price never covers the actual clean up cost. =3
They didn't because the taxpayers will finance that and no politician would be able to sell this.
Yes, it is part of Trump's tariff deals forced on e.g. Japan:
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/us-japan-in-smr-deal/
Italy should be buying proven French technology instead.
Which proven French technology?
Given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and that the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 fleet are ruinously expensive France is unable to build competitive new nuclear.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Look up Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, it was 14 years late and (depending on whose figures you believe) cost nearly 10x more than the original estimate of €3 billion, bankrupting Areva in the process.
I'm Italian and I'm super happy with this.
The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind.
Curiously enough, some Italian town signs still have a small sub-sign reading "denuclearized municipality" (example: https://live.staticflickr.com/1421/712461235_e46a2c7db5_z.jp... )
In my country, we also have a dormant nuclear plant because of Chernobyl and political reasons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/world/asia/philippines-ba...
As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?
Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?
It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.
We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.
Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:
Some recent ones:
Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...
I'm interested in why people think this is wrong, in case this is the reason for the downvotes.
Because what is true for these 3 countries is not true for all countries. There are counter-examples where nuclear is cheaper.
In most countries which don't have the advantages of Australia or Finland, you do need a mix as the OP was saying
What is Italy lacking? Sun? Wind?
Usually comes down to industry energy needs.
The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.
Aren’t SMRs essentially unproven? I think only Russia and China built some working facilities, and the rest is still under construction.
I mean anything could happen but seems like a long shot
They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.
Gotcha - yea I think it’s a good idea to try out these things. I just hope it doesn’t become a ideological fight to make something work at any cost to fit a certain narrative (same goes for renewables of course)
In a nutshell, yes.
The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel.
What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power.
I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output.
That doesn’t mean they won’t have a use.
About the last question, i don't think the old plants will play any part in this eventual return.
Fair - but using new (unproven) technology imo only increases the cost/time/risk overall?
can you link to data to prove the economics are bad?
Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Thanks for sharing those links, very interesting.
I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays.
Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh
You can also check the report from RTE (French grid operator) that models several scenarios and mentions this security of supply thing
https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/publications/ene...
It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
Two words: base load
And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)
Is there something unique to Italy that makes it an intractable problem? Where I live we've been able to shift a huge amount of our fossil fuels over to batteries in a relatively short time. It's nice that nuclear has power production 24/7 but it seems unnecessary when there's already a glut during the daytime
The fact that nuclear is good at the easy part of power production is not a point in favor of nuclear. Grids are built to peak needs; any grid that can handle peak load can handle base load.
Can you use more than 2 words in your explanation next time? Reciting known talking points offers little.
lol because nuclear reactors are so damn stable: https://www.euronews.com/2026/07/13/france-shuts-down-nuclea...
Where in Italy would you put reactors?
https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-i...
Sardinia?
Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.
we had a referendum in 2011
Right after Fukushima
I don’t know why commenters here are treating energy technologies as winner-takes-all. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and that’s fantastic news for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it suits every country, every niche, and every application. There are plenty of places that don’t have massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather. Even if nuclear isn’t ever the cheapest option, the world energy market is so huge and diverse that it still makes sense to have nuclear as an option.
When it comes to Italy however, nuclear does not fit that niche of a plausible technology.
Finland? Sure! Italy has far better, cheaper, routes.
>massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather.
Italy has all that right across the pond.
And no energy source can beat solar on the speed of build out. And when it comes to the energy the next few years is all about build out [for AI]. Countries who get it right - like China, look at their solar and new datacenters getting powered by it, may be US if the required thinking wins - are going to lead the world in the near to mid-term future, the rest are going to be struggling seconds.
>Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build.
>The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved.
Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.
I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?
I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.
Still doesn't make sense. We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Radioactive material and a bit of water.. there's no reason to design those things a hundred times. France actually did that.
France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. As for floating SMBs in the harbour, I don't think climate change will be kind to this idea.
We were still learning about flaws and failure modes of nuclear reactors. Designs kept evolving to try to address these. We never got to the passenger airliner model where we had systematically eliminated nearly every failure mode and could produce this on an assembly line.
> We could have standardized the old reactors too.
Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited.
Now, whether the market for any of these SMR reactors is large enough that any of them will be able to see any of these supposed economies of scale is a big question.
You can in theory build a SMR next to a data centre, so I guess we’ll find out
Floating nuclear plants next to a city sound like a recipe for disaster
> France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer.
That's because French nuclear power plants are designed to be directly cooled by river water instead of using cooling towers.
The biggest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde Generating Station in Arizona) is cooled by evaporating the treated wastewater, in the desert.
All these extra methods of preserving water adds cost, to a technology where paid off plants are struggling. Let alone ruinously expensive new builds.
At least these installations don't need to deal with radioactive material directly, so they will have the same financial infact as similar improvements to, say, coal-fired power plants.
They don't materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant. Cooling towers or evaporating ponds are not expensive. Coal and gas power plants also use them.
You just can't easily retrofit them onto an _existing_ power plant.
If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them. Evidently they are not free.
> If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them.
Pretty much all the new thermal power plants are (including biomass-burning plants), except in places where cool water is not scarce.
It's weird to glomp onto that idea, as if it's some kind of a fatal flaw of nuclear power.
You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.
Single family homes are very much standardized. You get doors in one of 6 widths (IIRC), and they are all the same height (closet doors are a different height, but otherwise standard). You get windows in a few dozen sizes. You get your wall studs in one of two lengths. And so on.
There is a lot of variation of layout possible within the constraints of the standard. However the vast majority of the hard work is done in a factory to standard sizes, and the onsite work is just final assembly to easy to change specs, so there would be no advantage to a standard.
New suburb housing developments in North America typically use a handful of floorplans that are customized very slightly across many homes specifically so they don’t need hundreds of unique designs
Also the majority of changes someone might want with stud frame construction are simple and require 10 seconds of drawing to show the framer.
The whole point of stud frame construction is that you can do basically whatever you want because it is overbuilt and all the connections and joints simple.
Right. So why don’t we see residential construction costs fall with this standardization? Because wright’s law / economies of scale don’t work when you are doing all the assembly on site.
You absolutely can. Read up on the French nuclear reactor fleet!
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...
There are minor variances locally, but you can make enough components common to benefit massively from economies of scale.
It will reliably cost only 10x, and it theory it will roll of a production line.
The AP1000 reactors at Vogtle were explicitly marked for the modular construction as a key selling feature, which would reduce time and cost. It came out 20B over budget and 7 years late.
It's a great story: in theory you can produce modular components of a full scale nuclear power plant in a controlled environment. In theory.
In practice the production line wasn't as controlled as it needed to be and ended up delivering modules that needed significant rework. That caused modules to be delivered and ready out of order. In other words they bought a lot of project management complexity that was hidden behind the theory of modularity.
SMRs are turning out to be even more expensive than conventional nuclear power plants, which are so expensive compared to renewables that even without a risk premium they are uncompetitive.
Vogtle, Hinkley Point C- are all one off constructions and have very expensive regulatory compliance requirements
AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range.
Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did.
Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.
Are we prepared to play kingmaker and pick one SMR design to standardize on so that those can ride their theoretical learning curve (assuming we get enough buyers)? Because politically that doesn't seem likely, and I think we'll end up with the units that do get contracted to be spread across multiple firms, none of which make it out of the expensive first few units.
> Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C
Per wikipedia: initial cost estimate €3.3 billion, cost in 2020 (6 years before it was done) €19.1 billion, so 5.8x the budget. Supposed to enter operation in 2012, entered in 2026 "only" 14 years late.
These are terrible results.
That EPR2 series are "expected" to cost less says absolutely nothing. Flameville 3 was expected to cost 83% less too, and I except that if they swindle people for the money to build it we'll see it'll be just as much of an overrun.
The nuclear industry seem absolutely incapable of sticking to a timeline or budget. And any one of these failures should have been disqualifying. But they get to do it over and over again.
That is why even Flameville 3 was cheaper than Hinkley point C, not that it was cheap.
Flameville 3 is the first reactor for France in 21st century and suffers the frequency problem I am arguing. It was a path finder therefore only one was ever ordered. EPR2 is 6 under construction and France does have a track record of doing it consistently at scale for cheap(by nuclear standards).
The Asian giants all do it for cheaper because they build regularly, Japan (post Fukushima policy direction notwithstanding) and South Korea achieve overnight numbers of $5-6M/MW or less, so does China.
Regular construction is key, to the industry having a chance, without SMR that is never realistic anymore.
The most annoying thing about Hinkley Point C is that after all the delays and investments, the electricity it generates won’t even be cheap. £133/MWh!
Right now we have politicians arguing that a £90/MWh strike price for offshore wind - where the construction of the wind dawn is entirely encapsulated by the strike price - is expensive.
Look at the proposed EPR2 subsidies. It is interest free loans and €100 per MWh on top of that, while assuming large learning effects.
They are admitting Flamanville 3 like costs before they have even started building.
Overnight costs do not get impacted by guaranteed purchase price or subsidy for it neither does it include interest rates. It is a specific aspect of the TCO.
Nobody is saying nuclear is cheap it is not - we will be building a plant once in while for pure strategic reason no matter the cost anyway. The point is construction cost comes down per MW with higher frequency of plant building, and this is the case SMRs, we can get cheaper construction both Per MW and overall TCO in absolute dollar terms relative to large plants with SMRs.
There is no economic case for SMR that you couldn't make for a larger one with a massive benefit of economies of scale. SMRs are - in my opinion - a dead end, larger reactors could work well but will be delivered later and likely will still not be profitable on a KWh basis when compared to an equivalent installed base of solar and wind and will most likely be deliver much, much later.
A theory with a lot of leaps that is in no way guaranteed. But it’s a nice idea
Wright’s law is the only way to reduce costs. It’s a generalization of Moore’s law. The more of anything you build the cheaper it gets. Most products get 10% - 20% cheaper every time total production volume doubles. The most obvious example right now is rockets - launch costs are going down exponentially because we (SpaceX mostly) are doing so much of it we are finally getting economies of scale. SMRs will too, but only if they become popular. It’s a little bit of chicken and egg, but the economics are clear. If lots of people start using SMRs they WILL get cheap. And it’s a form factor where it’s plausible lots of people will.
That's another interesting theory, but Wright's law doesn't mitigate many other disadvantages of SMRs: the need for multi site security; the need for on-site technicians at more sites; the need to build grid hook up to more locations, etc. There's a reason reactors grew to a certain size, no smaller and no bigger. Ignoring that lesson has a high price.
Prefab & faster construction possibilities would be a big one.
Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels.
In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.
This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.
I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.
Because Trump is pushing SMR on all "allies", UK, Japan, Italy:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzevzwxwro
I couldn't find immediate investments from Kushner etc., but will dig further.
It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?
> I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar.
Solar is 15% - a lot but not yet dominated. Solar works at day and demand is also highest during the day so solar should not be an enemy of nuclear.
It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.
This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.
Citation:
France's EDF Warns Solar, Wind Surge Straining Nuclear Fleet Costs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037839 - February 2026
https://web.archive.org/web/20260217122120/https://www.edf.f...
Related:
Wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener... - January 22nd, 2026
> Wind and solar overtaking fossil fuels in 2025 can be largely attributed to a staggering rise in solar power. Solar grew by more than a fifth (+20.1%) for the fourth year running. It generated a record 13% of EU power in 2025, above both coal and hydro. This trend was widespread: all EU countries saw growth in solar generation compared to the year before, amid a huge expansion in EU solar installations. Solar provided more than a fifth of electricity in Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands. Renewables provided nearly half of EU power (48%) as unusual weather conditions caused hydro generation to fall by 12% and wind by 2%, but boosted solar generation. Wind remained the second largest EU electricity source at 17% of EU power, generating more than gas. Signs of a structural shift are clear across the EU, as wind and solar generated more electricity than all fossil sources in 14 of the 27 EU countries in 2025. Over the past five years, wind and solar have experienced massive growth (from 20% in 2020 to 30% in 2025). Fossil fuels have fallen from 37% to 29% in the same period, while hydro and nuclear remained stable or slightly declined.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... (installed solar energy capacity goes brrr)
> certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, and it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. Once the power plant is built, it provides 50+ years of nearly free energy. It's that or buying gas from Russia.
Yes no real cons if we exclude the small con of being completely economically unviable.
Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.
> it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.
The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).
So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.
Nuclear fuel rods get used for 1-2 years before they need to be replaced. This is much longer than it takes to burn a shipload of liquefied natural gas, though it's much shorter than it takes for solar panels or grid scale batteries to need replacement. Both nuclear energy and renewable energy are less sensitive to supply shocks than fossil energy, even if Europe doesn't reduce the percentage of its energy needs that depend on imports.
Yes, but the parent was implying 50+ years of nothing to worry about once a plant is built.
It would cost a bit more is the worst case if you had to build your own centerfuges, uranium is not all that rare. And a single ship could carry a decades worth of fuel (not that I recommend a decade of fuel on a single ship), so even if shipping was costly it would be cheap compared to the actual fuel refinement. You couldn't Hormuz a uranium fuel supply because it doesn't take thousands of ships or miles of pipeline to deliver.
So maybe not worry free, but if you are able to run nuclear reactors for power to start with, obtaining fuel for them in any scenario shouldn't be impossible. You got atleast a year or two lead time between refuelings, and it might be able to be stretched a little longer in an emergency. And even more time if you hold some in reserve.
Australia and Canada are top producers of uranium ore, and uranium ore is a small fraction of total lifecycle costs. Given a ~2 year refuelling cycle and the possibility of stockpiling uranium, this is very far from an interruption to oil and gas flows - which you need a continuous supply of. Security isn't just a function of autarkic raw material supplies.
Idk we can import uranium from lots of places; i think currently mostly from Canada.
But I just don’t get why it’s being discussed at all - its obviously so much more expensive and time consuming to build than the alternatives
>Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,
That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.
The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.
Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
>t's that or buying gas from Russia.
Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.
And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?
Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.
It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.
To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.
What if we just skipped the certification?
How about nuclear fuel still being dependent on either russia or us? and that is just one reason.
Conspiracy hat time: I think this is the main reason it's being pushed so hard. The US and Russia feel threatened by the rise of renewables and will do anything to get countries dependent on them again.
> Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment
... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)
> It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.
For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.
People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.
That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.
And nuclear has still sat there being too expensive and solving nothing, proving the point, but apparently this is evidence of the opposite.
My argument was that while waiting for renewables to become cheap, we could have built nuclear instead of fossil capacity and avoided a shitton of emissions. The Messmer plan being an existence proof that such a thing would have been possible.
We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage?
Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.
To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.
I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
> I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.
I mean, you need to radiation-harden your structural materials and electronics for both fission and fusion, and some hypothetical antimatter reactor is probably using an evolutionary version of EM confinement techniques from fusion.
But, yes, fission reactors are ultimately kind of ooga-booga (put a pile of metal in some water and run a steam engine) that's hard to characterize as on track for something sci-fi like an antimatter reactor.
What does "Upgrade to the next level" even mean? What next level? Where is the dividing line? Why should we, beside all other concerns there are?
> upgrade civilization to the next level
Why?
Civilisational levels are defined by orders of magnitude in energy use.
Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.
Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
This is not how people are expected to converse on HN.
> The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
My mom is in her mid 70s and grew up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a child in Bangladesh. She still imagines a Star Trek future is inevitable. If anything it’s Gen Z that has a small and narrow vision of what’s possible.
It isn't about space travel. The AI boosters use it as a pretext for powering more data centers.
Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?
I don't think we should let musk appropriate nerdy space dreams.
Hand him the nerds and you'll hand him the future, for better or worse.
Getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue.
I would not want to walk in pajamas on a sterile spacecraft and deal with new aliens every week.
Star Trek is a socialist society.
Getting the tech without the social change first (e.g. what Musk et al are going for) gets you a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a post-scarcity utopia.
You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards.
It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.
I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged.
I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity.
You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.
Your theory is contrary to the evidence of history. Technological progress makes people more free, not less. 500 years ago, you would have been a serf and your life would be literally worthless. In much of the undeveloped world, that’s still true.
And 30 years ago you could still afford a house. Tech helped people up until the internet, then it started to enslave them and make them poorer.
All new energy initiatives should be nationalized and out of the hands of the tech robber barons.
What's my life worth now?
> upgrade civilization to the next level
What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?
Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.
I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.
Nuclear power plants are uninsurable in the private market. There is no natural investor base for a product that is uninsurable. Unless you are an imagining a culture war where real capitalists are fighting corporate welfare queens, it's not a culture war issue.
Time and demographics are also a component. Italy is old, has worker shortages for living wage work (and is currently issuing ~500k work visas over three years to attract labor to the market), and a new nuclear generator takes at least ten years to build. Each year, an additional 1TW of solar will be deployed globally. Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/italy/
> 49% of Italy’s electricity was generated from low-carbon sources in 2025, below the EU average of 71%. As of 1 January 2026, Italy was aiming for 69% of renewable electricity generation by 2030. For the country’s latest renewables targets, see our 2030 Global Renewable Target Tracker.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/IT/fifteen_minutes
Record 2026 summer heat impaired nuclear generation in France, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, so I'd be curious how they intend to solve for that as the climate continues to warm (reduced capacity factor from reduced output due to cooling constraints impairs the economics).
France to Upgrade Heat Wave Modeling After Record Nuclear Curbs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790006 - September 2026
Europe's Heatwaves Are Putting Nuclear Power Under Pressure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49466909 - August 2026
Bulgaria's Nuclear Plant Plans First Output Cut Due to Low Danube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376860 - August 2026
Record heat is drying up Europe's major rivers, as these striking images show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283344 - August 2026
Bloomberg: Hungary Casts Doubt on Nuclear Plant Expansion After Danube Low Levels - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/hungary-c... - August 13th, 2026
Italy to issue half million non-EU work visas over next three years - https://www.reuters.com/world/italy-issue-half-million-non-e... - June 30th, 2025
115 $/MWh.
Thats what EDF's stating their NUWARD SMR (up to 400MW) will cost in France, just as comparison. Not cheap for the taxpayers in Italy.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-plans-10...
That's about half of the average cost right [1], so literally it will make electricity cheaper. Also, it will be cost that will not go up willy nilly when someone decides to do something absolutely stupid
1: https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/electricity-price
Hopefully Germany will follow next. It’s absurd that they rely on fossil fuel and coal when they can build modern nuclear plants that can provide stable energy for the energy heavy industries.
It would take 5-10 years to build the power plants and maybe with Chinese aid even faster
I don't think that nuclear projects of any size could pass current environmental impact assessments.
Only a severe energy shortage could motivate politicians enough to temporarily skip these, like they did for the LNG terminals. But you can't build a nuclear power plant of any size within a single legislative period so its just not going to happen.
No thank you, we will happily continue with our investment in wind, solar and battery storage.
hopefully not
Fun fact: in the 60s Italy was after the US and UK the county with the most advanced nuclear energy plants. These days still North Italy produces key parts of nuclear reactors in other countries.
Exactly! Italy during 60s was building nuclear plants, launching satellites, computing and pioneering in several advanced fields
I wonder how much of a factor is that nuclear plants are effectively "unbombable". Ukraine's thermal plants have taken a beating, but their nuclear plants are still generating.
There should be a shared EU nuclear consortium, a public version of Airbus but for nuclear energy spearheaded by France.
Even if it passes, you'll see the first nuclear power plant not before 15 years.
And it will not pass before the next legislature in 1 year.
This is somewhat strange. Italy has a lot of sun, and a lot of mountains for these pumped storage hydropower plants. It is way harder to store output from PV on Great European Plain.
Has there been a single SMR deployed and working yet? There were lots of talk about GE BWRX-300 and Rolls Royce SMR but none of them seems to have even started construction.
Can someone explain me like I’m a middle age person why Italy, and France, bet on nuclear fission?
It’s not competitive on cost anymore and we don’t have a good track record.
As an Italian, I know exactly how this playbook plays out.
Nuclear energy is a big business for intimates friends, so on the trend that it's a green tech (apparently no carbn footprint, but what about the depleted fuel?) they approved the reopening of this technology.
Why going for SMR?
Well, it's the penalties business model and SMR is ideal because they are on paper, no valid proven commercial implementation. A company wins the contract, in this case i'm not sure if they'll go for a open bid, the contract include research, design, building and so on. At some point the political wind changes, contract canceled and hundreds of milions in contractual penalties to pay. It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends, with zero obligation to ever break ground.
It's from 19th century that they are thinking about a bridge between Sicily and mainland. The last time the project was revived, the playbook went exactly as described above: years of studies, cancellation and massive state penalties paid out to contractors for a bridge that still doesn't exist (Sicily and mainland are on different tectonic plates).
No mention there is no national deposit for nuclear waste, especially in a highly sismic territory.
>It is essentially a mechanism to transfer public money to private friends,
I agree completely and would go so far as to claim that presently in 2026 that money-transfer mechanism is the real motivation for any nuclear project in any country. Renewable options are the better path now from a technical point, but politicians and their buddies can't easily make as much money from that.
Voting for it is easy and I hope it catalyzes innovation. But still, completing a damn reactor without insane budget overruns is the problem.
David Sacks had an interesting stance on SMRs on Oct 19, 2024, before the election. Notice how he stands up for the downtrodden, poor population:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye012kzWJ3A (1:10:10):
"I'm virtue signaling because I'm Pro nuclear yes it's a luxury belief you're promoting something nuclear power is a luxury belief you heard it here first because they're going to put these things in poor communities and so it's never going to affect your life they're putting them next to Data Center in like Oregon like it's easy for you to say oh I support nuclear look how Progressive I am look how smart I am you haven't internalized the downsides [...]"
Sacks' image polishing agency is unhappy about pointing out gross inconsistencies. Do not question your betters.
Really good news for Italy and for the whole of Europe (if not the world)!
The atomic revival of Europe
Enrico Fermi will stop spinning in his grave
> after voters *twice* rejected it in national referendums
Democracy is just lovely.
Have your citizens answer to a straightforward question on a topic twice, have them reject it, both times.
And the government will still go its way.
I'm not against nuclear per se, I'm just baffled at the "democratic" process.
The referendums were in 1987 and 2011, respectively. Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.
It’s much less frequent than the usual democratic election cycle, where people are also allowed to reevaluate their positions.
> Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.
But nobody asked, there hasn't been a third referendum.
It doesn't work that way in Italy. A popular referendum can only abolish an existing law, partially or fully. The general public cannot vote to adopt new legislation.
The government was elected by the people - if they disagree with this decision it will have consequences in the next election.
I think the public opinion and sentiment has changed quite significantly since 2011 when the last referendum was held.
The current Italian government is massively populist so they wouldn’t do this if they thought people would disagree.
I don’t see any problem with the democratic process here - sure it’s a flawed system but I believe it’s still the best we came up with so far
I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.
Shouldn't people be allowed to change their minds?
A party can lose three election, and if they win the fourth, they still get into power.
Sweet. Minimum 20 years and $20Billion before any electricity is produced.
I wonder how much solar, wind and batteries you could get for that, and how quickly it would be deployed
So their plan to burn oil and keep the AC mandated no cooler than 24°C in their homes didn't work out? Huh.
I just don't get people saying how terrible climate change is going to be for the world and then refuses to support nuclear.
If climate change is such a critical problem, then let's try everything to get this solved even if it costs more to do it. If you are only willing to do some solutions because it is cheaper then I don't believe you when you say it is important to solve.
And frankly, we don't know the full impact of climate change, so having as many alternatives as possible just makes sense. Hydro can be impacted by droughts which will be more common. Solar may be impacted if there are increased storms. Wind may be impacted due to stilling (slowing of wind due to an increase in co2).
Why not throw nuclear into the mix to ensure we do not run out of power?
Because having a solution would put the climate change organisations out of a job.
HN is full of solar salesman.
Nature is healing.
Presidente Giorgia Meloni is awesome and it’s amazing to see a woman empowered by the democratic process and serving the will of the Italian people
https://youtu.be/sNhPplje7xM?is=h5VtnMe9wva-VKGM
Always funny to see how plutonium pilled hn is. Nuclear power in Italy is idiotic. They won't even be able to cool the damn reactors. Europe is drying out.
Italy is surrounded by water, do you think the Mediterranean Sea is going to just dry out?
His ignorance is on full display when he said plutonium.