If you believe in a climate crisis and are serious about it you probably want to run the numbers on different options and policies to see what works rather than saying yay this boo that. Running numbers on producing energy in say 15 years time which is roughly how long it takes to approve and build nuclear, and comparing it with projected solar+wind+battery costs for 15 years hence you tend to come with much better figures for the non nuclear. (see graph here with the trend https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nuclear-vs-solar?hide_intro_po...)
China which is fairly sensible on this stuff and which plans to be world's largest nuclear producer by 2035 actually added 1GW of nuclear and ~300GW of solar last year because it's cheaper.
We can both build Nuclear that is safe and also build it faster. Its a matter of political will and reasonable regulation. Nations looking on the 100 year horizon would build nuclear and they would be newer and safer nuclear as time goes on. The next generation of reactors are safer and promise to be cheaper to build but the last of the GEN4 nuclear still are safe especially when we actually pay to have nuclear regulator inspectors. The things we are willing to be cheaper on are always the inspectors but never the permitting its so backwards.
I don’t see why you would look at nuclear at all on a 100 year horizon. At that timescales you gotta look at the fundamentals:
1. We’ve got a free fusion reactor in the sky and collecting and storing that energy is fundamentally cheap. Especially in a long term perspective when the materials needed to store the energy will be mostly recycled and practically free.
2. We’ve got a free fission reactor under our feet. Drilling deep enough expensive now but there’s no reason it needs to be. Se Quaise for progress in that area.
3. In a 50 year timeframe we don’t have any spare capacity to add more global warming from the thermal forcing of thermal power plants. Yeah you heard me right, thermal power plants contribute directly to global warming, and the effect is surprisingly significant. The good news is the effect disappears rapidly when you shut them down, unlike greenhouse gases. And we should certainly never shut down any nuclear power plants until we’ve eliminated greenhouse gas emissions. But at the same time, while we have an insane amount of greenhouse gases lingering in the atmosphere we can’t afford adding global warming from thousands of new nuclear reactors… like some nuclear proponents would have us do.
A 100 years from now, if we’ve brought greenhouse gases down again, that’s when we can start considering adding significantly more nuclear power. Though I doubt there will be any interest. Makes sense for space travel though.
I’m pro nuclear despite all that. But more from an R&D perspective.
1 - fusion reactor in the sky is not that easy to capture 24/7 due to nights/winter. BESS can partially alleviate the problem, not solve it.
2 - geothermal has an inconvenient property to lower output over time.
3 - nuclear requires far less grid investments, far less mining/materials
4 - If we are serious about nuclear we should investigate up to smallest detail how hitachi deployed first ABWR for such a short time/low cost and do that in series, en masse. I can bet in 20y Germany will still have far worse emissions than France
For China, nuclear power plants are still not very important, they build a lot new coal power plants.
"2025 also saw China commission 78 GW of new coal power capacity, which is more than India’s net coal power additions over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024"
The reason why people tend to get a bit cheerleadery about nuclear power is because it has some great PR and it resonates with them.
It needs the PR because it is so unconscionably expensive. The public needs to be primed to consent to indirect and direct subsidies.
The reason China, US, France, it is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with nukes.
The reason Sweden, Poland, Iran, etc. build a few plants is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with a nuclear weapons program they might want in a hurry one day. It's always obvious for those countries who the existential threat is.
very little supply chain is shared with weapons, dont spread nonsense. If you want weapons it's far cheaper to have just an enrichement facility exactly for that.
And nuclear is cheap. Look at lazard estimate for existing fleet. Or open swiss data. Or even german data
Nuclear costs about 5x as much as solar and wind according to Lazard. This doesnt even include catastrophe insurance (taxpayers are on the hook in the event it goes boom and there's an $800 billion fukushima style cleanup fee).
I dont think it was price or global warming that got Poland suddenly interested in 2023. They dont want to build a nuke today but if their existing nuclear umbrella suddenly gets yanked away...
You talk about new projects based on Vogtle costs.
You need to look at the Lazard lcoe for existing fleet which didnt have such delays.
Fukushima cleanup could have costed much less. Jp govt wanted it to be expensive.
"They dont want to build a nuke today but if their existing nuclear umbrella suddenly gets yanked away..." - again, it's unrelated. If you want weapons you can have some secret enrichemnt facility for that. Much cheaper. Npp without enrichment are pointless anyway for weapons due to parasitic isotopes.
The typical investor algorithm is timing the market or analysing stocks doesn't work so keep buying index funds. That can go on and on unless people run out of money to buy with.
There's a limit to what we can do. Things were kind of stable before Trump went in bombing everything and I guess we a hoping he'll calm down and things can go on. There isn't an easy military solution to opening the straits it's hard to do diplomatic stuff with Trump issuing some new threat every 24 hours or so.
>European countries are rushing to refill military stockpiles after U.S. President Donald Trump last year warned NATO members that they needed to spend more on defense and rely less on the U.S.
I don't think that's the main reason. It's more the impression that the US can't be relied on to defend against Russia, especially after the oval office meeting where they went on about Zelensky not saying thank you. I got stuck in a crowd on the pavement for twenty minutes after that because all the European heads and Zelensky flew into London for an emergency meeting to discuss the "oh shit the US is no longer going to defend against Russia" issue and they decided to ramp up our own defense and support for Ukraine.
It was a worrying situation because if Ukraine were to fall, Putin would then probably round them all up into the Russian army and look at attacking EU territory like the baltics leading to an EU/NATO vs Russia war. Hence the arms.
> tracks 6,278 extension
I just tried it and in 7 mins it got to 800 errors so that's like 50 minutes to do them all, using ~5% of cpu.
reply