This still has to pass with the people in a referendum.
The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic.
Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change.
We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.
Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.
> Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though
France got there first.
They built out such a massive infrastructure of Nuclear that they are a net provider of energy in Europe. They are also the only country to date that has officially pushed back on old safety models like LNT.
France also apparently lost an ungodly amount of money doing so. It was so embarrassing they literally don’t want the figures publicly available.
They ran headfirst into nuclear’s capacity factor issue. You can scale back a nuclear power plant’s output outside of peak production but it has minimal impact on your costs. You save a little fuel but need more complex designs and end up spending more on maintenance. Thus they ended up exporting a great deal of subsidized power for minimal wholesale prices because demand across Europe drops at similar times (nights and weekends) while importing power when it was most expensive. This further discouraged nuclear in other countries as France subsidized everyone’s nighttime rates.
Hopefully France can make scaled back version augmented by now cheap solar for daytime demand more economical.
In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.
From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container.
The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.
Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.
Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown?
It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic.
Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.
Like they said, if it’s properly stored and monitored it’s not going to harm anyone.
If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.
Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.
Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.
This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for the environment”.
Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.
Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company chosen to build it first proved to be incompetent and later also politically undesirable. As for the third reactor, the company that got the permit determined that it makes more sense to invest the money in something else.
China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.
solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
> Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing.
> It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?
I don’t think it can. Nuclear is cheap at scale, not when you build a single prototype every 20 years. You need large countries with large programmes to be successful.
Any country that does not use nuclear using less energy dense alternatives. Compressing controllable energy production should be considered one of our top priorities.
It's not and that's fine, but it's very much part of the European economic area, and we have a great relationship as well as a lot of alignments with standards and so on. The EU wouldn't have no issues taking notes from the Swiss.
Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days.
That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.
Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.
You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.
> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days
Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.
Whether or not that's the case, the problem is that if you put together all the nuclear, solar, wind and hydro we can manage, we will still have less energy than what we get easily with oil.
I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.
It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1].
At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive.
It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death.
The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems.
Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently.
That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports.
"Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
Do note, though, that it was the unbelievable irresponsibility of past operators that has spurred the anti-nuclear movement in the first place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 from 27:44 to 31:35.
I'm not asking where they got funding. I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone. You don't find that strange at all?
The elites, powers that be, whatever you want to call them, had their own reasons for killing nuclear power. And nuclear's economics, compared to fossil fuels, didn't make it a slam dunk to adopt despite powerful opposition. So it had no one to defend it.
Environmentalists weren't just useful idiots then (and I hesitate to call people acting in good faith, without any self-interest, "idiots"). They're convenient fall guys today. The fossil fuel industry killed nuclear power and pinned it on the environmental movement. That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
> I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone
First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger.
> That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.
So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive. I'm certain there's ZERO correlation between regulations that make it expensive and regulations making it safe....................
So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?
> So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive
Yes, with extra steps.
Regulations, more so than their impact on price, cost calendar time.
Time, especially for already-lengthy and complicated infrastructure projects, costs volume.
And low volume means high prices and a slow pace of improvement.
Henry Ford wouldn't have built many automobiles, or improved them as quickly as he did, if every one needed to be individually permitted by multiple government agencies.
The failure of nuclear is that it never standardized and scaled to industrially-efficient volumes (outside of arguably France) at exactly the point that it could have technologically done so (~1970s). Had Offshore Power Systems^ begun producing floating reactors at volume in Jacksonville, FL in the late 70s, we'd be having a very different conversation about cheap American nuclear power today.
there are regulations that make it safe and the ones that make it expensive. its two different groups. radiation limits and design safety with meltdown prevention is one thing but then you get rules like radiation needs to be as low as possible until you run into a cost limit. that basically means setting a price floor for the whole project.
nuclear being expensive is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. the costs for certified equipment are high because the market is small and not competitive, because nobodys building nuclear, because everyone knows its too expensive to build and not worth it.
the only solution i see is massive state investment like what france was doing in the 70s. that would upset the market purists but its more practical than trying to push the industry with a neoliberal hands off approach.
> The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has over 7,500 reactor years of cumulative reactor operation, and nuclear powered ships have steamed over 175 million miles. Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity to the environment which has adversely affected public health or safety.
> ... which has adversely affected public health or safety.
Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.
>Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity
None of the theories put forward about the loss of the USS Scorpion have involved the reactor. Maybe they didn't discuss it because it wasn't relevant?
Ah, yes - "the evil environmentalists."
Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.
(As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)
Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.
France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.
Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal.
But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.
Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?
> Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
No need to run the world: in the last decades, some environmentalists have been lobbying against nuclear energy and in the end, the people in many countries have become opposed to it by fear of it. And that feared is fuelled (among others) by environmentalists for sure.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
If it's about comparing energies financially (and many other dimensions actually), nothing gets remotely close to oil. But oil is limited and oil is destroying the world.
Also not to forget: everything nowadays depends on globalisation and therefore oil. We like to compare renewables to oil, but we forget that they totally depend on oil at the moment. Without oil, we don't build much renewables anywhere. So an important question is: without oil, do we need nuclear energy or not? I believe we do. I believe we also need renewables, to be clear.
Those regulations you despise were written in blood.
Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it.
Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.
> If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent.
I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.
The effect environmentalists have on adoption is a rounding error compared to the humongous cost of nuclear power.
Most non nuclear powers have a few for the same reason Iran does: having some nuclear scientists and a developed nuclear industry around is handy in case of a, uh, geopolitical "emergency". This is why Poland suddenly became interested in 2023 specifically.
Most countries do not want a lot though - it's too expensive.
Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap?
They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.
1. Nuclear has a negative learning curve. It’s gotten more expensive with time. Part of the reason is increasing geopolitical risks (the U.S. just launched a war on Iran because of the possibility it may upgrade nuclear material to weapon capabilities), lost knowledge and expertise, and also the increasing relative cost of financing in the cost of energy projects.
2. Nuclear was built at a time when governments were much more likely to directly invest in energy projects. It didn’t have to compete with Labubus for private dollars.
3. Its current competition didn’t exist, given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten, and how much cheaper battery tech has gotten with signs all of them will only get even cheaper. And on the non renewable side, natural gas has become incredibly cheaper as well.
> given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten
In a world with a lot of oil. How does that evolve when we don't have enough oil anymore?
Feels like renewables are extremely distributed, which sounds like it may be harder to manage without the happy globalisation brought by accessible oil.
To be clear, I believe we also need renewables. But I also believe that we won't remotely replace oil, so we need absolutely everything we can imagine, and that includes nuclear energy.
1. I personally believe the “lost knowledge “ is overstated. Europe knows very well how to manage large scale infrastructure projects. It still has a healthy nuclear industry.
2. Once the vote is there(Switzerland is a direct democracy), the public funds will be there. Sweden has recently chosen to invest ~40B Euro.
3. Solar, really? In Switzerland?
Many parts of the industrialised world receive very little sun, especially in winter, where coincidentally, energy usage peaks.
And intermittent power generation like wind is no competition to nuclear.
These are very weak arguments. Good luck replacing Oskarshamn with solar panels…
For the renewables "Fast and cheap" turns out to mean you get the paperwork in the winter and you build a solar farm that summer, it's not quite sowing wheat - teams of competent people building the farm isn't the same thing as just chucking the seeds into the dirt with a machine, but the timeframe isn't so different.
Sweden's nuclear plants seem to have taken maybe 6+ years from breaking ground (not paperwork) to first power, so if you begin today you might have a plant in 2032 at the earliest. I can't see any prices, not even a CfD strike price for Sweden's new proposed plants.
The UK agreed £92.50 strike price (2012 prices) for the new nukes it may never actually receive, but unlike Sweden the UK has never pledged to relinquish nuclear weapons so to some extent having a native "nuclear" capability is relevant to national security.
Process works if you keep building, expanding and making it safer. If you don’t build it for decades, you’re basically starting from scratch.
It is a hard sell when you have to front a good chunk of money, without a track record of successful build ups. It applies to other infrastructure stuff like HSR.
The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively.
oh and dont get us started on the electricity zones and germany...
Turn on Barsebäck again... absolute asenine they shut it down. Will never happen, been too long, also owned by Uniper... (Germans)
And sadly S+MP+V will win this election it looks like. Say goodbye to any new nuclear power. Also it will be 2015 all over again but that is off topic...
Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.
Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.
I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".
Your link says increased modulation adds 1.5-3.75 million euros/year in maintenance costs. That's utterly insignificant for the electricity supply to a nation of 70 million.
I really hope Swiss people learned a lesson from Germany and vote to build nuclear power plant. We need more investment in research on how to build safe, efficient power plants and ways of re-using spent nuclear fuel
What kind of environmental impact does hydro have in Switzerland? I’d expect it’s less because they are in the mountains.
I’m against a lot of Hydro power in the US because the environmental damage is high. Plus I like to fish and they have huge impacts on the ecosystems. But these are relatively flat places compared to Switzerland.
I agree with you that you can't rely on hydro alone to power your country. It also seems like you're trying to be reasonable and suggest that any new nuclear production in your country needs to be done as ethically and environmentally friendly as possible.
Your statement about "We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time" really stood out to me.
Are Swiss folks maybe acting a bit NIMBY by not allowing nuclear in their own country, but are fine with buying French nuclear power? It seems a tad hypocritical to be against nuclear, while simultaneously using it as long as it's "not in my country".
1. Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland?
2. The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years - what's the plan for managing it?
Yes energy generation (and independence) is important, no nuclear ain't it.
I wouldn’t pin the irrational discourse on the left. Pro nuclear people are just as k=1 thinkers as well. We just need long term policy not short term panic.
> The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland
Does discourse from neighboring countries leak in as well? For example, German and Italian media's anti-nuclear sentiment versus French media's neutral to vaguely positive sentiment about nuclear.
French part of Switzerland is much more left leaning, so I can expect more anti-nuclear sentiment on this side. But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
But, Germany's decision after Fukushima to close down all nuclear reactors has had a strong impact on the 2017 votation that banned nuclear in Switzerland. So I guess the influence is there.
> But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
People aren't really partisan like that in Switzerland. They'll happily elect people from one party then vote against the party on specific issues in referendums or initiatives.
For something like nuclear, people who vote for green party might be mostly aligned with the party because it's a key issue for them while people who vote for center or right parties won't really care what the party recommends.
> the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for
Unless you personally agree with whatever your preferred party's line is on everything and generalize that sentiment, I'm not sure how to get to that conclusion.
So French Swiss or German Swiss aren't going to be consuming French or German news media? If so that's refreshing compared to Canadians and Brits who constantly try to butt into American media and culture wars (eg. Rebel News, UnHerd) and vice versa (eg. X)
Switzerland's multilingual situation might look primed for a balkanized culture war, especially if you are coming from a place where that is common. But 1) it's a country of 10m people and 2) the national identity is centered around being unified despite language differences.
Of course people make jokes and remarks about "those people" who speak a different language. But "those people" are probably 1h away by train, are probably coworkers, and their language was taught in your school (even if some didn't bother to learn).
We have national media (German: srf, French/Italian: rts, Romanche: rtr), people consume that, and a few medias that have multiple language versions like 20minutes.
We also have a few language specific medias (German: NZZ, Tagesanzeiger, Blick, ..., French: Le Temps, 24 heures, La Liberté, ...), but I think most people consume Swiss media, especially when Swiss politics and local afairs are absolutely not covered by French and German medias.
The funny thing is that people know more about what is happening in the neighbouring countries than in the other parts of Switzerland. The "national" media is very divided and only covers French-speaking regions in French, German-speaking in German, etc. as if they were local media.
Switzerland is like that. I remember asking (in my best German) the person manning a ticket counter at Zurich train station if they spoke French once, if a look could kill I'd be dead, lol.
It gives the strange feeling that although they decided to create a country together they don't want to interact with each others unless absolutely necessary.
That's not it. Everyone in Zurich studies French at school, if you speak slowly to them in French, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (if they are familiar with the context of course). Similarly, if you speak slowly in German to a French-speaking Swiss, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (again, if they are familiar with the context).
It's just harder to speak in another language than to understand it, so if you ask someone to speak...
Next time, ask them if they understand French :-).
It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.
The time for nuclear power was 50 years ago. And it's sad due to unfounded fears and coal interests there weren't more built. I would love if historically we had build more nuclear power plants. I am against it now because we have other safer, cheaper, and more sustainable options.
It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing:
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
- nuclear waste is not a problem
- nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors
- we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
There really is no excuse for people to be misinformed. If you actually want to understand this issue start here, but there are many other sources out there that can also help:
The reason people are not aware of it is because it's utter tripe.
In the US, coal generation has been falling for twenty years because it's more expensive than wind and solar. Same reason nuclear is being phased out - grid operators can get power cheaper via wind, solar, import/export, and battery storage.
I feel the same frustration but for the opposite reason. I am entirely confident you must be misinformed, not me.
I suggest you read actual bookkeeping statements from nuclear operators, national budget items, historical records about radiation incidents, nuclear deposits, agreement texts and the like, instead of reading books that can only be true if they adhere to the information in such sources.
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
It it is inherent to nuclear power, because you really need to spend the money and effort to keep it safe. It's very dangerous.
Here is where people usually say "but stats show it's killed fewer people per GWh generated than other sources". But that's not relevant at all. Nuclear power is dangerous entirely independently of that statistic. The reason so few have died is precisely that we spend all that money keeping it safe!
A gun is dangerous even before you shoot someone with it. It's not safe because nobody has shot it yet.
Science will tell you in detail what would happen if radioactive waste was spread in a populated area. There is so much information, please read up on it. So far it hasn't happened. Even Chernobyl was very far from a worst-case scenario.
- nuclear waste is not a problem
Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily.
The US gov spends millions per year guarding abandoned nuclear waste. They don't do it for no reason.
Again, you need to realize that it is actually dangerous. That's why it's expensive. You need to spend LOTS of money to keep it safe.
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
People have died from radiation exposure every decade since it was discovered. People die from minutes of exposure to barely visible amounts of radioactive elements.
Please follow your inclination to be informed. Don't take my word, don't take Jacks, go to the records of actual events and base your opinion on that.
My take - In 2026 we have developed a type of glass that can fetch electricity entirely for free from sunshine and store it in a container of the most abundant element on earth, or even use the surplus carbon from the atmosphere to generate synthetic fuel that can store energy for years.
That's where we should spend time, money and effort.
In 2015-2016 I did some mechanical engineering work at BWXT, designing nuclear waste containers for the Bruce Power CANDU reactor refurbishment program.
I learned that the spent fuel storage is pretty trivial for a few reasons:
1. The amount of fuel waste produced by a reactor is volumetrically tiny. So it's not too expensive to just have a relatively small guarded yard of sealed storage casks next to the reactor, where the fuel can sit and decay until safe for offsite disposal (typically around 60 years).
2. Safe waste storage containers are relatively easy to make. Most containers only need to be a thick stainless steel inner liner and a stainless steel outer liner filled with a special mixture of concrete. The nuclear waste is dropped in, the lid is bolted shut, then the container can be safely left in a guarded open yard for >100 years. They are safe by virtue of just having ridiculously thick welded stainless steel walls. We designed them to fall off a train going over a bridge, fall 300ft onto solid rock, and not break.
3. Reactor technology keeps getting better at extracting more energy from fuel. So what was "waste" in a past decade, can be put back into a reactor that is better at pulling energy out of the fuel. For this reason, there hasn't actually been much actual "fuel waste" in the history of the nuclear industry. It's all just being stored for future use by better reactors.
For the parts of the plant that cannot be put into landfill then storage like any other waste. Given how long they last, and how much energy they output, the waste is still very low per unit energy. Try this:
Why would you decommission them after all that investment instead of re-fitting? What would the ecological consequences would be if you demolished the Hoover Dam? Some things just have to be built to last as long as they physically can.
- nuclear waste, after a period of the order of ~10e2/3 years is only dangerous if ingested. So it's as dangerous as any other poisonous substance after that point. There is no need for radiation shielding from that point.
- nuclear waste is very dense and so physical surface storage is cheap, and a solved problem (see: dry storage casks). We can fix leaks if/when they happen. Waste is concentrated
- current nuclear power stations (light water reactors) burn about 3% of their fuel leaving 97% unused in waste. There are nuclear power solutions which would burn most of the fuel (leaving very little for waste). So if we developed these technologies (see molton salt reactors being one of them) then nuclear waste would no longer be called "waste" as it would suddently become an extremely valuable feedstock for use in reactors.
- related to the prior point: why is it that we think we will not find a use for this very valuable and rare reasource in the future. We should think of nuclear "waste" storage as "rare element storage" which will be very useful under some states of the world. We just don't know how yet.
- as with any technology it should also be compared to the alternative when considering it's fitness: waste from the alternatives is far worse
100-1000 years order of magnitude. I can't remember exactly, but it's well within our ability to engineer and manage, rather than the signs that try to answer the "how do we communicate danger to later species" types of timelines
They could do what the fossil fuel industry does and just disperse it into the atmosphere until it disappears behind background radiation.
Realistically deep geologic storage is absolutely fine, and even if it's not happening now, all of the waste can be safely stored above ground for hundreds of years.
After the Fukushima disaster, radioactivity was detected in the seawater off the west cost of America. This, of course, threw people into a panic, despite being detectable only with very sensitive equipment and was not a danger to anyone or anything.
To be more specific, you would not have been able to detect Fukushima waste based on radioactivity, as the radioactivity would not have been detectable above the normal background radiation.
They could only identify the waste by it's distinct radiological profile. Otherwise it was just another source amongst millions of ionizing radiation that bathes us every day.
Basically, nuclear waste from power generation is a much smaller problem than people assume it to be, the solutions for managing it are already in place, and there have been few/if any accidents that have ever caused contamination from waste disposal.
Also I'm not an industry shill, but orphan sources from industrial/medical radiography have killed and injured more people than nuclear plants and their waste. Yet there's hardly the amount of opposition to those systems that you see for nuclear power, despite nuclear power having a far more significant impact on the healthiness and stability of global populations if we stopped banning it.
The only fair way to compare the cost to solar and wind, is if wind and solar producers would have to make power guarantees 24/7 and cover the cost of the production gaps (hint: this makes solar and wind very expensive).
Not sure if that's fair. Sometimes the sun actually does shine, and while you won't get rich selling energy during that time, having electricity available essentially for free during some of the peak hours is worth something. Someone will eventually find a use for free energy. If nothing else, at least we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.
When the sun shines sure you can power down other power stations, but you still need to maintain them and have them around for when the sun doesn't shine. So when you have lots of intermittent energy it means that you actually cannot shelve your old technology - you still have to maintain it, but now you're paying for the maintenance over less capacity used. This is only one of the reasons why prices are going up in heavy renewable grids.
> - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.
Solar panels, wind, and batteries have all dropped in price so much that solar backed by batteries to create stable powers (and/or wind doing the same, or a mix), is in the vast majority of the world vastly cheaper than nuclear.
> - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors
All of which are fundamentally expensive.
> - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear
Every kw of nuclear production we create is resources we could have instead put into adding more than 1 kw of solar backed with batteries at this point. Moreover the other renewables would come online and displace fossil fuel usage faster. Thus spending money on nuclear results in a more polluted higher CO2 world, not the other way around.
There was a time when nuclear was the cheapest way to build clean energy, that time has passed and isn't coming back.
> - the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
Many people have died from radiation exposure. Many people have gotten cancer from radiation exposure years later. Many many square kilometers of earth have been rendered uninhabitable by distribution of radioactive isotopes. This is misinformation and spreading it is frankly dangerous. A very healthy dose of respect is required whenever handling radioactive materials and people should not be told otherwise.
> Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.
The actual operating costs are extremely low. Most of the cited $/kwh figures include the capital costs of the extreme 10+ year approval process. There's also no economies of scale right now.
If you add up all of the deaths directly from radiation exposure in the nuclear power industry it's literally 31 - and 28 came from Chernobyl. It's a fraction of rounding error compared to every other energy type.
Nearly all of the dangers of radiation were cooked up by the oil and gas industry based on a series of now discredited fruit fly studies in the 1950s.
Chernobyl killed 31 directly (i.e. acute radiation poisoning), and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed... I don't know where your 28 number comes from but there's no dispute that the direct number is higher than that...
There's been a handful of other purely civilian disasters that killed people with radiation from sources meant for nuclear power, and a large number of military ones.
But if we're looking for civilian radiation deaths the majority outside of Chernobyl aren't nuclear power, they're radiotherapy, because the nuclear power industry was appropriately regulated after the early mass casualty events resulting from military nuclear reactors (e.g. the Kyshtym disaster at 200 to 8000 deaths) and the Windscale Fire at (100 to 240 deaths) and it's harder to regulate the more wildly distributed health care applications.
That we're handling things with appropriate care isn't evidence that they're not dangerous.
$100 / kWh capacity, over 10000 cycles, is $0.01 kWh delivered. It's dirt cheap.
Also that's not the cost though. You're looking at vehicle packs not stationary storage packs at that cost. We've seen stationary storage packs get down to $50/kWh last year - with an average pack price of $70: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...
And prices continue to decay. Those are the most expensive prices you'll ever see going forwards.
And there's other benefits. Batteries distribute well, letting us lower grid related costs by making more constant use of the chokepoints in the grid for instance.
What choices make nuclear expensive that we could actually get rid of WITHOUT IMMEDIATELY increasing risk (which is low because of regulation)?
Moreover, it's crazy that so much regulation was provably written in blood paid by workers and public after a company got greedy. Sure, let's build 50 AND reduce regulations.
Finally, the biggest fucking thing: It is MORE expensive NOW than the green alternatives, AND green energy has proven over the years to actually keep it's promises of improvements, compared to fission and SMRs, which are always just 5 years away.
Renewables have been incredibly effective at providing more capacity at good cost, but they still have drawbacks. Aside from the obvious variability everyone harps on, location does play a nontrivial role. Switzerland is not as good a candidate for solar or wind as many other countries due to constraints in usable land and availability (valleys have more shade than steppes for instance). I don’t think anyone needs to be saying no to renewables when they consider investing in nuclear. The two technologies serve very different purposes in an electric grid. Base load is still a problem even with battery storage, and it makes a lot of sense to have reliable power available that is not from fossil fuels to deal with that demand. There is plenty of fossil fuel based generation to replace, it doesn’t have to all be nuclear or renewables, in fact all one or the other doesn’t make much sense.
It’s true nuclear is expensive. It’s also true a lot of that expense was the regulation that has made it so incredibly safe. It’s unlikely a cheaper but still safe enough compromise will be reached in countries with existing regulatory structures quickly, but there is certainly room to improve over time.
* every dollar spent on building new nuclear will be put to use so late it effectively increases CO2 emissions
* A country like Poland is the biggest emissions perpetrator in Europe, and the fact they are building nuclear means they will stay that way for literally decades
* The fossil fuel exporter countries are pushing nuclear as their agenda. Why do you think that is?
* Not a single country has a working permanent solution currently for waste storage.
* The UK cannot clean up Sellafield at all. They had the bright idea to process waste and are now sitting in hundreds of billions of pounds of estimated costs to dispose of it.
The reason is that your body has mechanisms to fix the problems of radiation. For example, when you drop a stone in water would you say that you "break the surface of the water"?
Our DNA is very similar - DNA damage occurs naturally. Our body has processes that fix DNA strand breaks. Radiation that occurs because of most exposure that has ever occurred is so minimal that the body's natural defences against radiation damange means that the harm is precisely zero. The body literally repaired itself much like that water surface repairs itself.
Harm does occur however when the rate of radiation exposure exceeds our body's ability to repair itself. However this threshold is well above any threshold we regulate around.
For more information the key words are "dna double strand breaks" and "LNT vs SNT"
Nuclear energy is really the energy of the future, fission still has bright days ahead of it. the startup market for SMRs is going to boom once the core challenges will have been solved, sure that we will see many ETH founders go into that world
Every SMR startup is failing. The more they progress, the more they revise their costs upwards.
SMR make as much sense as space datacenters. You can gaslight investors, you can gaslight HN, you can gaslight a national parliament full of lobbyists, but you can't gaslight thermodynamics.
One is regulatory. At least in the US, every nuclear reactor that produces at least 100 MW needs to carry a 375 million dollar insurance policy at minimum. Under 100 MW there is an alternate schedule that ranges from 5 million to 75 million scaling based on output. But the net result is that it's still more profitable to built a single large reactor, since a 1 GW reactor is less to insure than 10 100 MW reactors. This is written into law, it would require Congress to change it.
Second is that nuclear reactor efficiency tends to improve with size. The ratio of thermal watts to electric watts tends to be better with large reactors. I'm not super well versed on the engineering tradeoffs here by my rough understanding is that waste heat scales with surface area while useful energy extraction scales with volume.
In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't seem to be too expensive. According to the NRC, insurance is per site, and additional reactors on a site don't increase the insurance nearly as much as the first. The example they give is $1.1 million annual premium for a $500 million policy, with multi-reactor sites going up to $1.5 million. They also mention property insurance ($1.06 billion policy) and they didn't discuss the premiums on that, but as it's not liability insurance it's probably cheaper.
The big costs are still going to be the cost of siting and building the reactor, the fuel, and the ongoing cost of running it. They pay off over a very long time horizon, so it's also the opportunity cost.
Just one so far and it's not particularly small compared to a more conventional reactor.
Russia actually does have a smallish SMR but it wasn't terribly cheap to build nor operate. IIRC it is in the form of a ship and used to power a city somewhere in the north.
SMR has a place for sure but no one has demonstrated the unit costs savings of making a lot of them yet.
You can actually get some, if not most, of the economy of scale by doing a fleet build of one specific design. The US seems to be working on that and picked the Westinghouse AP-1000. I think that initiative has a decent chance of succeeding. The first few will be slow and expensive to build (even China has had delays with their nuclear roll out) but the subsequent ones will get cheaper and faster to build. This is how some countries did it during the first nuclear power expansion era.
How are SMR's "gaslighting themodynamics"? I mean, sure, I can accept that they're not economical with current tech, but it's not a frigging' perpetuum mobile, it's feasible technology.
Your small nuclear reactor is going to need almost as much engineering , plumbing, safety mechanism, personnel, maintenance, etc... as your big nuclear reactor.
The value propositions of SMRs are logistics and re-use of existing infrastructure. The idea is that you could have easily transportable reactors that you can plop down in an existing coal plant, and then reuse the turbine, dynamo, etc. that are already in place.
The fact that we haven't seen more widespread use of SMRs suggests that you're right. But it's important to point out that there are cost saving opportunities that could potentially reduce the net price per watt despite worse thermodynamic efficiency.
The mindset that makes people stuck in time. Sorry but SMRs are potentially very cheap. Not at this point. ,but when operated on scale they will be. You need to start
So a whole lot of sense given the entire US Navy uses them and I already have one datacenter operating up in space (small test unit that over 3 months has provided ZERO issues) and a bigger one heading up into orbit next year when it's done being made.
"but you can't gaslight thermodynamics"
No but you can certainly conflate them like you're doing right now.
The Navy uses highly enriched uranium for its reactors, something like 70-80% enrichment. This is a non starter for civilian use, on account of proliferation concerns. That, and the enrichment requirements drive up fuel costs.
Ok, this is interesting. I am skeptic about DC's in space, but I do appreciate people actually doing stuff. What is it computing up there. How did you get it up? How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary.
Hyperspectral satellite imagery - think ASTER/LANDSAT/MODIS but more modern, for surficial minerals study.
"How did you get it up?"
How else? Paid a rocket company to launch it into orbit after proving various flightworthiness tests and getting various certifications and permissions from relevant gov't authorities.
"How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary."
K-band. Don't need tons of power, just a good LoS from ground on your target. And yea, not Geostat, I'm in LEO.
you are in this thread a lot, so i am guessing you must be very familiar with the industry. maybe you can help me understand:
is the wikipedia on SMRs incorrect/lying when they say that there are commercially operating SMRs since 2020?
and how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money.
>how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
Or solar.
And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
Nuclear attracts clever people, but it isn't smart nor wise.
I think you have a misunderstanding of what a SMR is supposed to be.
Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to deploy and cost will be significantly reduced.
We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs and have been for a very long time. Off the top of my head ship power has been exported to local areas for disaster relief
Solar is absolutely fantastic and your average person should not be hawking at solar for your home to offset your power bill. The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.
I don't think the likes of Westinghouse, Siemens, Rolls Royce and GE are duped. They are trying to solve a very hard problem!
This is such a silly argument. Battery and solar technologies are progressing regardless of people building nuclear. It's simply not the case that we can stop investing in nuclear and use that money to accelerate battery/solar.
> For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop
This is a horrible argument. Yeah, let’s not spend money improving technology. We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.
>Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics.
true, you said "gaslight thermodynamics", which i have no idea what that means, so i took a guess at what you were implying.
>never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
is efficiency really the only metric to be considered? i feel like available space, availability of alternatives, time to complete construction, etc. are worthwhile to consider.
>And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments worldwide considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania. but i am not an expert. you are talking like you are one, which is why i am asking questions.
>i feel like available space, time to complete construction
All of these favor again bigger reactors.
>considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania.
All of the Swiss energy companies are asking to be bailed out in advance of the investment in nuclear.
Sweden recently did the same: in order for companies to agree to make new reactors, the government had to promise them a price floor for the electricity they produce. The price floor suggested is more than twice the current price on the spot market. That means that, for the lifetime of those reactors, Swedish taxpayers will be subsidizing production of nuclear power. I thought the idea was that they would be profitable? What happened to the political right’s love of the free market? When politicians go fixing prices with this kind of ”advance bailout”, it just makes it look like they are trying to get a nice retirement job in the nuclear power sector…
There are two ways of achieving economies of scale: making things bigger or making more of them.
For small quantities, the former is usually more effective -- making things bigger lets you make fewer of them, reducing costs.
For large quantities, a factory can enable insane economies of scale.
SMR proponents are talking about building dozens of reactors. That fits very firmly in the "small quantity" column where economies of scale almost always favor building things bigger.
I think the promise of SMR is that the 1/5th reactor can be built in 1/2 the time. And you build five of them in parallell. And you have your power sources gradually online over about the same time as one ”big bang” build would take.
I don’t think it’s going to work out that way, but that’s how it’s being sold.
Even like that, it is not clear-cut.
1/5 in 1/2 the time is still 2.5 shorter per worker, and building in parallel require multiplying expert builders, which is not easy (as it takes time to acquire the expertise and you don't want to learn a trade to build one project and have nothing to do next).
But, yes, I get it is how it is sold. Just that even sold like that, people with common sense should say "wait a minute, that's obviously not that simple".
Just a guess (I'm not the previous user), but I guess you need to look at the space _per GWh_?
If a big nuclear reactor takes 10x more space but has 20x more capacity, then it means not having much space favors the big nuclear reactor rather than building 10 small ones that will take twice more space.
its probably my fault for not making myself clear. i mean when the available space is constrained to a specific amount of space that cannot be exceeded.
just picking random numbers:
i have 1 square mile available. a big reactor takes 4 square miles. i cannot fit a big reactor, despite the bigger reactor being more efficient.
well, I don't think that there is a real problem of "1 square mile is available but not 4 square miles" (this is a different sentence than "there is not enough space"). Especially as small reactor also need to be placed very specifically. So even then, it is still possible that the advantage is for big nuclear plant, as they are still more compact per GWh.
>"1 square mile is available but not 4 square miles" (this is a different sentence than "there is not enough space").
how are these different? one is an example, one is general, but they communicate the exact same point. if you have something that requires 4 sq. miles, you cannot fit it into a place that is 1 sq. mile in size because there is not enough space to fit it.
>as they are still more compact per GWh.
i am really struggling here... if i cannot fit something large, whether the large thing is "more compact per GWh" does not matter. i only have so much physical space to work with. if its too big, its too big.
for a more easily visualized example, you cannot fit a reactor from three mile island into a submarine. efficiency doesnt come into the equation, because physical space constraints get in the way first.
There's no measure by which nuclear energy is the "energy of the future". It's too complex, too expensive and it doesn't scale. SMRs are proving to be a fever dream with ever rising costs and the number of nuclear reactors in operation is decreasing year by year and both Wind and PV are now each producing more electricity than nuclear.
Shutting down nuclear power plants prematurely was very foolish (looking at you Germany). But other than that, it’s true.
When you boil the issue down to the fundamental facts, our challenge is simply: add as much power production as fast as possible. We have no other hope to tackle the issue but to optimise for this. Nuclear is a dangerous distraction. Solar+wind is now growing faster than nuclear ever did at its peak and they’re showing no signs of slowing down. It’s the only way to get more power fast enough.
We are building power for a future where we cut all CO2 emissions. Not just those from electricity. Our second biggest priority (well third after EVs, but I’m not too worried about EVs right now, it’s a self sustaining transition) is to bring down the capital costs of hydrogen plants. That’s the key to bringing down CO2 emissions in several sectors of industry. This pairs perfectly with variable power. We’ve already seen green ammonia fertiliser plants paired with renewables and now with the Iran crisis there will be higher pressure to build more of them to be self sustained. This way also lets us distribute production which is nice to be less vulnerable in case of war.
Once green hydrogen production has reached critical mass, and growth of renewables have pushed gas power plants into more of a backup role, with low fuel consumption, they will naturally switch to hydrogen. Many of the newer ones are already ready for hydrogen and others have an upgrade path. Perhaps hydrogen consuming industry will co-locate with gas power plants to share production/storage infrastructure. This path has very low capital costs besides the ones we anyway need to make the hydrogen necessary to decarbonise industry. The gas power plants are already built in most countries that will need them.
That's a foolish thing to say because building enough nuclear, even with the fairy tale prices and times people make up, would take soooo much longer and cost sooo much more than green energy.
Even more importantly, it's very hard to compromise and downscale a project when the inevitable fossil fuel lobbyists vote against you. It's a lot easier to half a solar park project than a nuclear project.
We still have to deal with the consequences of a referendum hold not so long after che Chernobyl accident which made it illegal to build and operate nuclear power plants.
It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries. You even have the industrial prowess to make it all in the country step by step, whereas nuclear reactors are such humongous engineering projects that building the capacity is very out of reach.
Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how are you going to cool down your reactors? Nuclear in Italy is a non-starter.
Solar, wind, and even hydroelectricity are too dependent upon the environment to make up the entire electricity generation capacity of any major industrial country. With renewables, even with batteries, the actual production is within a range. Couple that with demand also being in a range you get uncomfortable possibilities at play. And while colder water is definitely preferable for cooling, I'd have to imagine that if the bodies of water were actually becoming too hot to cool a nuclear reactor system there'd be bigger problems than energy production.
The limit is not how cold the water needs to be for the power plant, but how hot it can be for the river ecology to not take (too much) damage. Even in Germany power plants regularly need to be shut down.
> 2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to shut down their nuclear power plants partly or fully because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm (Barber, 2022; Limb, 2022; Miller and Vladkov, 2022). Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature (European Parliament and European Council, 2000; IKSR, 2022b). The resulting unplanned outages — and the efforts by nuclear operators to avoid such disruptions — highlight pressing concerns about the sustainability of nuclear energy, particularly its impact on river ecosystems in an increasingly warming world (see Fig. 1).
I'd say "Supplementary Information for Strategic deployment of
solar photovoltaics for achieving self-sufficiency in Europe
throughout the energy transition"[1] fits the bill. It lays out various paths to 100% renewables (which in Italy, like in Spain, is heavily solar) by 20250
It's technically possible to replace rotating mass with batteries using a "grid-forming inverter", which is an inverter that converts the battery DC to AC with frequency varying depending on the grid load, simulating how that rotating mass would behave ("synthetic inertia"):
This competes with the traditional giant flywheel option ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser ), which has the advantage of being a simple and proven technology, and handling brief overload better, but the disadvantage of having moving parts. It's not clear which option is currently best. Both are in current use.
And as a third answer: You actually don't need to take the flywheels of the power plants offline, when you take the rest of the power plant down. The locations for them are perfect, as the whole grid has historically been build around them.
It's a world-wide competition to generate the most expensive electricity! The record is currently held by Vogtle in Georgia US, but Ontario Canada is trying to take the crown by spending $500B on nuclear.
Is there a cleaner, more consistent technology for baseload?
At a certain point, dollars are funny money if you are destroying the environment to save a few now by generating baseload with a carbon-producing tech.
Of course, let’s build the safest and most efficient nuclear that we can, but “its capex is too high” is not a compelling argument to me.
And to be clear: renewables should form as much of the capacity as possible, but a reliable baseload is obviously still needed.
"Baseload" is load, not generation. It's not necessary -- for example the small northern grids that only have diesel generators operate fine even though they have no generators that don't have the capacity for quick cycling.
Baseload was a cost optimization. Back in the day it was cheaper to build coal & nuclear plants that took days to power on. Somebody figured out that if a grid was built of a mix of those cheaper plants and more expensive plants that could start up quicker, it would lower costs. The typical grid was baseload coal and gas peakers. But ~20 years ago gas peakers became cheaper than baseload coal and any need or desire for baseload generation went away.
China is building a lot of coal plants to complement their solar buildout. Notably these are not base load plants. Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night.
Similarly, many new nuclear plant designs are not base load designs; they are designs that can be safely and quickly turned on and off.
P.S. the correct term for generation is "non-dispatchable", not "baseload"
> Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night
That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it need not be. In this case, China is building coal plants to address the baseload that doesn’t go away at night when the solar isn’t producing.
The answer is because we still do not know how to supply expanding electricity demand with wind, solar and batteries. The side of the story that people on this website love to bring up is the fact that China happens to be the largest builder of solar and wind, which is true, but the increased electricity demand is being met via coal, for the most part.
Because it was only in 2025 that batteries became cheaper than coal, so the lead times involved mean they are still building coal.
They're very rapidly ramping up battery bank installation, it's too early to tell if they're also ramping down coal plant installations, but it seems likely.
you'll be so happy about being price competitive when the conditions are bad for like a week and the country just doesn't run (or rely on other countries price gouging you for what your country needs to exist.)
Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible hand of the market hoping that price competitiveness means that it works well. Lives are at play.
Why do you need both? It's possible to get 99.99% reliability with wind & solar & batteries & weather modelling. There are multiple ways to handle a week long dankelflaute without nuclear: overbuilding, continental scale distribution, lots of batteries, etc. All are cheaper than nuclear.
It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid, even a nuclear dominated one. Local distribution has many single points of failure.
The marginal cost of batteries grows more than linearly.
When batteries are covering 0% of the need, the marginally added battery cycles many times, so the cost is spread over many kwh produced.
When you add batteries to go from 99.98 to 99.99, the batteries cycle only for that 0.01, so the same cost to build them is spread over a much fewer kwh, making each kwh produced a lot more expensive.
Seasonal storage is madness: you charge once and discharge once per year. Pay 100$/kwh to install it, discharge 20 times (20 years, a 5% payback time, which is a bad investment), and you're paying those kwh a 5$/kwh premium on top of the cost of buying the discharged power.
If the battery is instead installed to shift the production from 12.00 to 18.00, it cycles 365 times a year, so in 20 years the premium is 0.01$/kwh.
So nucleare doesn't compete with the first 40% of penetration of renewables and the first 30% of battery, it competes with the last 10%, which is still needed to get to 0.
Per Ember Energy reports, a cost optimal new build grid is between 90% - 97% solar/wind/battery, and between 3% to 10% gas peaker depending on how much sun/wind your locale gets.
But you can't replace the gas peaker with 3% or 10% nuclear because in essence that gas peaker is supplying 100% of the power 3% to 10% of the time.
So you'd have to build nuclear plants that can supply 100% of the power. But once you have that you might as well use nuclear power 100% of the time because the rest is irrelevant. But that's about as far from cost-optimal as you can get.
As you mentioned, using batteries for seasonal storage is madness. So to get to 100% carbon free you have at least 2 other options:
1. use a different form of seasonal storage. China is experimenting with this. In 2026 they will double the world's pumped hydro storage capacity. But doubling isn't a lot -- the world doesn't have much pumped hydro. But it does mean they might start doing it at China scale in a few years.
2. Overbuild to avoid the need for seasonal storage. Solar works on cloudy days and in the winter. It just doesn't work very well. So you need a lot of it. Which is expensive, but still a heck of a lot cheaper than batteries for seasonal storage.
In reality, most places will probably say that 95% or 99% carbon reduction is good enough and keep their backup natural gas generators around for the occasional dankelflaute.
Yes, if you put the cost of commissioning and decommissioning the reactor onto your taxpayers instead of including it in the cost of power, nuclear can be very cheap. I didn't try and translate the German ; but that's the trick Ontario Canada uses to false claim that nuclear power is cheap.
Existing nuclear power plants can be very cheap at $30 – $40 / MWh
New nuclear power plants would be much more expensive at $180 / MWh or more, due to strict modern regulations. Even with these regulations, there is no nuclear plant that is safe against a terrorist crashing an airplane into it.
The unsolved permanent repository problem is left to future generations.
Finally, building a new nuclear power plant will easily take a decade or more.
Cool, the price of solar right now is $30-$85 / MWh, and that range is dependent on whether you got storage included in the bill or not.
And that price will only get cheaper, as both the US and China continue ramping up production.
Nuclear? It would need to reduce its costs by 70% to get where solar is now. And then do it again to be competitive with where solar+storage will be in 10 years.
Sizewell C, its £38bn current price tag is looking very very shaky - £60bn final cost wouldn't surprise me. And our electricity bills are going up again in order to help fund it. Lovely
This is going to be a huge waste of time and money until we realize that building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then. Instead we could also just join a French project, who have way more experience.
We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.
There will be a referendum anyways, so I think it's unlikely the ban will actually be lifted.
It is when it's tied to "and I expect they're going to ask for giant subsidies from taxpayers".
Which nuclear inevitably does, both in the form of direct requests for money and by refusing to pay for adequate insurance to compensate everyone who will be damaged in the event of a meltdown externalizing the risks.
If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper.
(I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)
That's not why they were banned, and in any case lifting a ban on building something that nobody will build doesn't seem like good use of legislators time.
> we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then
That's a very, very risky bet you're taking here. We know nuclear energy really well, and you're suggesting we ignore it for something that we will "figure out" later. Meanwhile the clock is ticking.
> We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.
This is so limited that it's not at all an alternative, though.
Hydro power is often brutal for the local environment. There has been a whole lot of expensive and careful undoing of hydro power around the world in recent years in attempt to save various local species from extinction. There are second order effects too like how silt is typically deposited in an unblocked vs blocked waterway and what that means for downstream land or water quality.
> building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then.
That's a helluva prediction.
Thorium reactors would be practically limitless in fuel supply, but we aren't getting them without seriously funded nuclear research. That is far less likely during a band on commercial stations.
The same reactors nuclear powers with decades of experience haven't deployed?
We will get two or three revolutions in solar power and battery technology before a single thorium reactor is viable. You could invest all the R&D budget of thorium reactors in perovskite panels and it would generate more MW per CHF invested.
You should take note that you’re uninformed or intentionally spreading false information and misrepresenting reality.
Fact of the matter is it takes a large upfront investment to build a nuclear reactor and it has a longer time horizon before it becomes profitable in comparison to something like a gas or coal power plant.
It comes down to whether or not the country, government, citizens and country have the ability to think beyond a 4 year horizon or not.
Everybody knows about the upfront cost, but the size and long tail of costs after the plant has been built, or when unforeseen events occur, is largely hidden from all financial statements. So much so that people actually believe that nuclear power is cheap, when it's not.
But the truth surfaces of course - you can look at the financials of EDF in France (nationalized in 2022 with 60+ bn euros in debt), KEPCO in Korea (145 bn in debt), or incidents like Asse II in Germany, Sellafield in the UK, Rancho Seco in the US.
Billions of taxpayer money covering costs caused by the nuclear industry, and not appearing anywhere in any statement of estimates of nuclear power costs. Large, double-digit plant operators basically or literally bankrupt.
This to me is the bottom line. If nuclear power was cheap and profitable, people would be in line to build them as soon as they get approval! Instead, they want money.
The truth is that the industry sees no way to profitability here, except when they get access to current and future taxpayer money. This has always been the case for nuclear power and still is.
This argument cherrypicks legacy cleanup sites and distressed utility balance sheets, then treats them as proof that nuclear electricity is inherently uneconomic.
The real issue is narrower: new nuclear is capital intensive and hard to finance without long term revenue guarantees, while old waste sites can impose large public cleanup costs.
Decommissioning and waste are included in serious cost models and regulatory funding requirements, existing nuclear life extensions can be among the cheapest firm low carbon power sources, and KEPCO/EDF’s debts reflect tariff policy, fuel shocks, outages, state interventions, and investment cycles. Not simply “nuclear power is unprofitable.”
The honest conclusion is that nuclear needs strong regulation and disciplined project delivery, not that nuclear is categorically fake-cheap.
Aka what I said earlier: you need the ability for strategic long term thinking and planning and execution.
There's no false information there. Nuclear is complex and so expensive that despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel. It's also slow, with building times up to more than a decade.
France tried it. Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives, makes about €3 billion per year in profits and has to invest about €150 billion in new reactors, upgrades, refits and infrastructure.
It always amuses me when nuclear power is the one area where the left becomes Very Concerned about excessive government spending.
despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel
Except for France which came up with the clever strategy of "not banning it", but that was apparently a mistake and they should have just used fossil fuels?
Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives
€50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
I'm not actually that concerned about excessive government spending. I just don't like wasteful spending, and that's what nuclear is.
Wind and PV build up much faster, are orders of magnitudes less complex and provide cheaper electricity.
There is just no reason to build nuclear.
> €50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The actual cost is much, much higher, of course. French citizens still have to pay for their electricity, after all.
I like the idea that fossil fuel should take the hit from the impact on the environment, but don't see why nuclear should at the same time get a free pass for Chernobyl and Fukushima. Surely nuclear needs to take the hit from those as well in order to make the comparison apples-to-apples?
It hasn't made a significant contribution because of panic after the various accidents and the "environmentalists" deciding to advocate against it when it was the clearest path to accomplishing their stated goals.
Energy security is something I expect the government to invest my tax dollars in especially energy generation that is resilient to international politics and reduced carbon emissions.
Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
> Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
It is reasonable to have a many-year strategic reserve of uranium for what you need. A modern reactor is going to go through 20 tonnes of enriched fuel a year and they refuel every 18-24 months. 5-10 years of security and stability is much, much better than oil and gas.
> The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
There isn't enough room in my house for anymore people but there's enough room for a new couch. How can these things both be true? Probably because the two have entirely different requirements and "there isn't room" is shorthand for many, many things.
Not saying they're right, just that this is a bad counter argument, especially since the alternatives all have the same problem.
> Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
Yes, you need water capacity for cooling, about 2x as much as a gas plant for the same output. Definitely a trade-off. I don't know or care enough about Swiss water access to argue here.
Slight hyperbole, but nuclear reactors in Switzerland and France shut down more and more often because the water needed to cool them down is already too hot:
> It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers.
Note though that those limits exist just like the emission limits for WiFi: it was a sane number when it was decided. It's not clear at all that raising the temperature a little more will "kill all life in the rivers". It would probably deserve some research.
Not opposed to defence in principle. But Switzerland's army has proven, repeatedly these last few years, that they are incompetent. From understanding a multi-billions contract before signing it to selecting relevant technology (drones that fundamentally cannot fly in a civilian airspace, etc).
Not only incompetent: the way the F35 was handled really looks like corruption from the outside. And for some reason the head of the defence ministry AND the head of the army left not so long after that...
The estimated levelized cost of electricity changes dramatically with financing cost: from roughly the low-$100s/MWh under cheap capital to well above $200/MWh under high capital-cost assumptions. But wasn't that the case for wind and solar too?
For solar I believe it's profitable without subsidies in most parts of the world by now. It's the fastest growing power source by far worldwide and it wouldn't be if it had to be financed by subsidies.
I don't know enough about wind to say either way about that.
But both wind and solar have the benefit of being able to just abandon the plants if they turn out to lose money. Which you of course cannot do with a nuclear plant.
Rancho Seco in the US has had a taxpayer financed security crew for 36 years without producing any electricity. That costs eats away at the profits (if any) generated by the plant when it was operational, but nobody keeps track of that.
The costs are not relevant to the nuclear operator and are not retroactively counted as costs for the electricity, since the government pays.
But they pay with our money. And our children's money. And their children's money.
Well, wind and solar were absolutely subsidy-driven. The difference is that after subsidies, they became cheap and modular, and I hope nuclear becoming modular and cheaper as well.
Rancho Seco.... what an insane story. Didn't know about that. So if your have a bad nuclear project, people are basically stuck with it, unlike replacing solar panels or wind turbines.
Switzerland, Norway and Austria are probably the country that needs nuclear the less, but anything to start the discussion in other European countries is good.
Probably not economically viable in Switzerland though.
Hard disagree. As a. swiss voter, this is close to my heart.
50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission.
Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise.
To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potential losses of hydro power as glaciers melt, nuclear + solar is the only real path for switzerland.
Why hasn't Switzerland deployed solar/wind? That seems like a pretty big miss in general. The Swiss grid has almost no wind which is strange for such a mountainous nation. And solar is also quite low which is also strange given how much empty land exists in Switzerland along with it's relatively low latitude.
Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol:
The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.
People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.
They do and it's a problem, but it's a minor issue compared to, say, cars or rat poison. Both kill lots of birds, but somehow when it's wind turbines people suddenly care about the birds. See also: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/technology-articles/...
I will probably vote in favor of nuclear, but you have to admit that us not having any uranium and having huge solar and pumped hydro potential up in the alps makes Switzerland pretty bad match for nuclear.
As you are Swiss, where would you get the uranium from? I expect that the Swiss Alps have some mine, especially in the south west (I didn't check) but is that enough? You might end up swapping a dependency from foreign providers of oil and gas with a dependency from foreign providers of uranium.
to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.
Like I said in another comment: nuclear only makes sense if you build it at scale, because you need very specific skills and knowledge that is hard to get to build it securely, on time and cheap. Ideally you would have one company/conglomerate that would get one plant off the ground per year across the EU, but currently that isn't possible.
...You guys have mountains everywhere, which means dirt cheap hydro energy storage for solar and wind?
I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.
I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.
I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.
I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....
I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.
Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale
Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.
We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)
Wind would be particularly effective in Switzerland and it's fast to deploy. The swiss grid has less than 1% wind which was pretty shocking to me. It seems like Switzerland has a particularly bad renewable story for an EU nation.
Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule.
The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).
Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.
Oh wow, I didn't realize that! That's crazy, basically everyone that borders them are EU members. I was also under the impression (but haven't checked) that it was pretty easy to cross the swiss border both into and out of the EU.
> I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.
Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?
Build a solar plant in the Sahara desert and ship the energy long range,
Nuclear's probably still more expensive than that.
I'm not saying we give up on nuclear entirely. It should be at the well-funded research and prototyping phase for another 10 years.
In my opinion, at least for consumer energy, I think perovskite solar cells and sodium ion batteries for home storage will enable a very large oversupply or overcapacity start evening out the intermittent fears.
I think we (as in Switzerland) are preparing for a future in which there is not much snow melt/precipitations to fuel hydro production year round.
In fact, if the AMOC weakens/stops then there will be a drastic drop in precipitation across Europe and funnily enough maybe the temperature drop so much that the little snow there will be won't melt in big enough quantities.
Of course this is just a ban lift, meaning that there are no concrete plans to build one or more, but if there is a need to move "fast" (nuclear is not, I know) at least there is one less hurdle. I sincerily hope we invest in other technologies, especially now that Sodium batteries seem on their way to solve grid level storage, but I don't necessarily see this as a bad move per se.
It is no coincidence that countries which need it least can unban it. Deindustrialization activists will focus their efforts on countries where the ban matters.
Small land area, mountainous, northerly latitude… it’s not that wind and solar won’t work, but I don’t think you can automatically compare costs to giga-scale solar farms in spacious and sparsely populated equatorial countries. Even if more expensive, nuclear will have a niche, and it’s madness to rule it out.
Yes, it may be more of a symbolic gesture for Switzerland's own needs but it's still good to correct the historical error of prohibiting a broad range of potentially viable approaches from ever being considered.
- We have a lot of hydro, that are very cheap to produces and for some of the power plants we fill up water by using solar and wind when that is very cheap and generate power back when it's demand for it (meaning selling it expensive)
-Norway export more then we are importing. But that could shift in the coming years.
-Nuclear power are expensive, so with the current prices it do not make sense to have nuclear in Norway. Thought that could change (see point 2)
- not sure what you mean by "little land usable", you can absolutely be correct. in terms of size we are bigger then Germany. But I'm not sure how much usable land there is vs other countries. We do not have that big population but it's spread out and no one wants a wind park in their neighborhood
Technically yes, but also no. The European electricity market have way, way to many rules and caveat to draw any conclusion, especially France with ARENH and other distortions.
It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.
I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.
France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.
Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.
Like the F-35 fighter jet, this is just another victory for lobbyists in the industry who will be able to siphon public money into over-budget, deadline busting white whale projects that will never recoup its costs.
Especially nuclear. It is now economically non-viable.
Nuclear is about the next 50+ years. The economy will explode long before that. Nuclear plants are a way to produce energy in a world without cheap oil. That changes the economical considerations a lot.
Civil engineering, power equipment (ABB is a big firm in Switzerland), Energy companies (the market is Switzerland is a constellation of local monopolies, who have already announced they won't invest their own huge money reserves in nuclear, it will have to be all public money and garanties), etc.
Civil engineering and power equipment companies also profit from other plants. In fact, there are specialized power companies for wind and solar. Can't speak for all countries, but lobbying for green energy in the USA, according to PACs, is higher than nuclear. I don't think Switzerland is different.
If energy companies won't invest, then either don't invest public funding, or invest but with focus on developing long-term technologies. After all, the primary reason for nuclear being uneconomic today is lack of investment. If solar and wind can be made profitable, I don't see how nuclear is any different.
Still, the positive note of this is the ban lift, not whether new reactor will actually be built.
It it turns out like the F-35 it would be amazing. F-35 is much better and safer than what came before and more important CHEAPER per unit than previous generations.
Lots of people in this thread look at this as a pro/anti-nuclear debate. But few people consider the fact that the first election from the said nuclear plant will be produced 25 years from now in the very best case. Plus, nuclear plants have a huge cooling problem during summertime.
Whether people like it or not, nuclear power is the path forward for the foreseeable future; at least until nuclear fusion becomes a reality. With incoming AI/automation, ya’ll need all the power ya can get.
Yeah what the hell, I want tiny and small nuke-batteries so we can finally get cars and phones that doesn't need charging anymore, would solve a lot of problems and surely won't introduce any new ones.
What you really need is 24/7 power supply, it might become a luxury to have uninterrupted electricity exactly as it is a luxury to have enough of fresh water.
When you're in one place, you'll just have a battery+solar I bet, but for when on the go, maybe for days, having a tiny nuclear battery that lasts N years would be great.
The pro-nuclear propaganda in this discussion reminds me of the tobacco companies that claimed smoking was harmless, or of Monsanto, which insisted that its pesticides were safe, and so on. It is always the same pattern: obvious facts are denied, doubts are exaggerated, legitimate concerns are downplayed, and blatant lies are spread. I wonder how many undercover lobbyists for the nuclear industry are active here on HN.
Switzerland seems like a country where they wouldn't have trouble hiring enough very responsible serious people capable of running nuclear plants. Aside from being able to acquire fuel is there any reason they are not near 100% nuclear?
They built their existing nuclear plant in order to hide their nuclear weapons program. So the point really wasn’t energy generation. Nuclear weapons is the main reason countries build nuclear power.
There are people which want the best we can do (eg, no Ng, coal, etc) in electricity generation. Sensible reductions, that sort of thing. Then there are those that just want no electricity to be used at all, ever, period.
They'll complain about hydroelectric(carbon in cement production), about things which can happen with nuclear(accidents), about birds in windmills, about the production methods of making solar panels, and so on. To such people, doing anything is bad for the environment, so therefore, every type of power generation is bad.
To listen to such people is, of course, madness, as is listening to all extremists. We should simply ignore them completely, but of course the news exists, fake protestors exist which are paid, and so on and so forth.
Combined with Italy's change of heart, hopefully approved and put into law before July 2026, this is going to mark the revival of nuclear energy in Europe. Here for it
end non proliferation rules. its blocking nuclear adoption way more than environmental movements ever did esp in developing countries. and imo its better for a lot of countries to have nuclear weapons than just a few, if they have to exist at all.
This is at best the concept of a vibe shift. Even if they started sprinting now, it would be 20 years before anyone would see the results of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear is so much more expensive than solar and wind that building one is certain to raise electricity prices.
that's just lifting the ban and is pure virtue signaling. none of the electricity producers in switzerland actually want build nuclear power plants, because they are way too expensive.
They have a pretty small population, but wind will likely be intolerable because it will harm views[0]. Solar requires surface area as well. So that leaves hydro, which they'll have to pump during the summer months to ensure they have coverage for winter, or nuclear. Or fossil fuels, of course. Gas is still probably optimal for them. I suppose that's the nature of things. We all care very much about the climate, but we do care about our views more.
0: I personally like the look of wind turbines but I understand many don't. The appearance is likely why the Trump administration canceled such projects.
While I'm sold on the fact that modern nuclear can be built & administered safely in the face of natural disasters, and is a net good environmentally, I'm worried about corporate cronyism's corrosive effects on safety (a la Fukushima) and future instability in the form of cornered animals (e.g. Putin, Trump) acting erratically by bombing civilian infrastructure.
If the Swiss thought it was in the national interest to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and crash-develop a nuclear deterrent, I think that they could achieve nuclear breakout quickly.
And as usual the nuclear brainwashed lobby on HN still think it's 1990 and nuclear is cost effective.
It can't cope with peaks. It has to generate the same power 24/7 to be anywhere near economical at two-three times the cost of solar+storage, so it either needs massive storage or massive overprovision
Lets say you have a peak demand of say 40GW but average demand of 600GWh a day (25GW), or 219TWh a year
Lets also say you have to shut down a plant for a week a year for maintenence
You need to build five, 10GW plants to meet your demand.
They provide 5 * 10GW * 24 hours * 7 days * 51 weeks or 428TWh.
If nuclear is $110 per MWh, that means it's going to cost you $47b a year to generate your power requirement, or $215 per MWh
So you're needing to roll out storage, same as you do for wind and solar, or spend twice as much on overproducing.
Tangentially related: the Swiss built a research-focused nuclear reactor in a cavern. It had a meltdown in 1969, and they were able to keep the decontamination/decommissioning efforts to a minimum by just entombing the thing in concrete.
Honestly, so long as the water table isn't too close, that's not a terrible place to put a nuclear reactor.
One of the little gems the Russians pulled off in the twenty aughts when they were flooding nonprofits in the USA with dirty money was hijacking the green movement to promote fracking. (Because surely ANYTHING is better than those dastardly electrons or whatever the fuck radiation is made of)
Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants, and with advances in breeder technology new plants doesn't nessecarily mean new mining operations, which often are quite harsh on the surrounding area.
japan actually seems averse to any kind of change in a way they aren't. do swiss atms close at a certain time of day? do many takeout places want you to fax orders? there's a lot of things that go beyond "conservative" in japan in the risk averse sense into just being stuck in the 80s.
Switzerland is a small country. 3000 square kilometers of the earth is uninhabitable because of nuclear accidents. That would be almost 1/10 of Switzerland. Probably not a good idea.
Swiss will get nukes, denmark will get nukes, sweden will get nukes, finland will get..poland, ukraine, germany, armenia, georgia, armenia, turkey, vietnam, japan, south korea, emirates all gonna get, saudi already got.. [this list is incomplete, you can help to complete this list by doing a empire]. Ironically during the cold war a ton of countries went and became almost nuclear powers. Now thos world is so back baby and the reality denial and loud noises do nothing. Almost as if this plot device never had any connection to anything.
This still has to pass with the people in a referendum.
The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic.
Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change.
We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.
Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.
> Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though
France got there first.
They built out such a massive infrastructure of Nuclear that they are a net provider of energy in Europe. They are also the only country to date that has officially pushed back on old safety models like LNT.
France also apparently lost an ungodly amount of money doing so. It was so embarrassing they literally don’t want the figures publicly available.
They ran headfirst into nuclear’s capacity factor issue. You can scale back a nuclear power plant’s output outside of peak production but it has minimal impact on your costs. You save a little fuel but need more complex designs and end up spending more on maintenance. Thus they ended up exporting a great deal of subsidized power for minimal wholesale prices because demand across Europe drops at similar times (nights and weekends) while importing power when it was most expensive. This further discouraged nuclear in other countries as France subsidized everyone’s nighttime rates.
Hopefully France can make scaled back version augmented by now cheap solar for daytime demand more economical.
Did waste management become a solved problem?
In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.
From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container.
The storage units for this stuff is incredibly robust and safe. Radioactive stuff is also incredibly easy to detect. No company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way. People would know right away. IMO, this is much less scary than being next to a chemical plant.
Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.
Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown?
It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic.
Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.
Like they said, if it’s properly stored and monitored it’s not going to harm anyone.
If you’re worried about some kind of societal collapse leading to it being abandoned, well in that case there are much bigger problems that are more immediately dangerous.
Waste management has always been a purely political problem, since breeder reactor designs have existed as long as enriched uranium fission reactors. Most of the waste of breeder reactors is radioactively inert; the problem is that mining uranium is profitable in itself, and it probably shouldn't be.
Snarky answer: It's simple, they are just going to build the final storage on the border to Germany. Then it will be their problem when it starts leaking.
I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.
This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years
And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy
What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?
Sure, you need the right place, but it's not like there's a shortage of space far away from everything.
Yes. It is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem as long as I’ve been alive, and the only reason we are in this situation is because a very sophisticated and organized network of activists convinced people that it is not a solved problem. I will never forgive the boomers for what they did here, it’s so incredibly sad. We could’ve had essentially free clean electricity but instead we shut down reactors “for the environment”.
What is the solution?
Where are the free nuclear plants?
Sizewell C = £40 billion
That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.
You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar.
Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past.
Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.
Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
Ask why it suddenly got so expensive and why delays were introduced. Hint, it happened more in some countries than others.
Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.
Political will is not the actual bottleneck.
Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company chosen to build it first proved to be incompetent and later also politically undesirable. As for the third reactor, the company that got the permit determined that it makes more sense to invest the money in something else.
China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.
China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies.
China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
Well see the problem is we'd get the reactor hardware and we'd have to write the control software ourselves ha ha.
In practice though Westinghouse still bids lowest out of the politically viable options these days. Korean and French reactors are rather expensive.
European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
That's a fair point. It's a difficult sell to say you have to pay more to help out your fellow citizens, in most countries.
There is no such thing as cheap nuclear reactor. Even cheaper Chernobyl type is expensive to build.
Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.
How much per kW?
China and South Korea build everything more cheaply because they have a better developed industrial base.
Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.
solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
Can you share where those numbers are from? I'd like to run a similar calculation on my own country.
Also I'm curious if you know how geography fits into this (like sunlight hours and stuff).
This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...
In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.
You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.
Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
> we paid dearly for that
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
Spain and Finland are not part of the same grid. Spain is in the CESA, Finland is in the NSA.
> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
> Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
> The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing. > It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?
>They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun.
Virtually nowhere gets zero sun.
Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
As well as a very low population density.
It is also possibly the best advert for not using nuclear power ever given the disaster of recent projects (e.g. EDF cost overruns).
I don’t think it can. Nuclear is cheap at scale, not when you build a single prototype every 20 years. You need large countries with large programmes to be successful.
Any country that does not use nuclear using less energy dense alternatives. Compressing controllable energy production should be considered one of our top priorities.
> The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days
I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.
These are not opposites. Both can be true.
Switzerland is not in the EU.
It's not and that's fine, but it's very much part of the European economic area, and we have a great relationship as well as a lot of alignments with standards and so on. The EU wouldn't have no issues taking notes from the Swiss.
Switzerland is not part of the European economic area, aka EEA.
It formally isn't but for (almost) all intents and purposes it is.
While it's not part of the EU as a member, Switzerland is quite literally in the EU.
You can escape Switzerland by going straight up into space. It's only "in" the EU in 2 dimensions, maybe 2.5 since you can't dig your way out.
Ah, that's what they're building the power plants for. Blasting things into space.
Just the opposite. It's literally not in the EU. It's literally in Europe but not in the EU.
I like that you ignore that “in” means “inside” in one sentence and then use that exact meaning of the word in the following sentence
OP was making a geometric observation.
By that light, the UK is still in the EU. I bet they would disagree though.
Solar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.
Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that.
There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter.
What should one do then? Just shut everything down?
Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days.
That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.
Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.
You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.
> the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days
Which in practice means you put down gas turbines while that overcapacity comes online. Solar + wind + nuclear makes the most sense for decarbonisation amidst demand growth.
Whether or not that's the case, the problem is that if you put together all the nuclear, solar, wind and hydro we can manage, we will still have less energy than what we get easily with oil.
I don't get why they even compete against each other: we need as much as we can of everything that we can.
It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1].
At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...
It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death.
The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems.
Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists have campaigned against it for decades. Still, it is not only used, its use has expanded until very recently.
That is because fossil fuels were incredibly cheap (as its environmental costs have been externalized), while nuclear has been incredibly expensive, even with massive government subsidies. Fossil fuels are also very practical, while nuclear is cumbersome and comes with real security issues (terrorists and planes and such) that have nothing to do with some hippies blockading nuclear fuel transports.
"Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
Nobody said it would be as cheap as solar. But "renewables" can't fulfill ALL power needs ALL the time.
When you actually need to generate electricity rather than gather it, what's better than nuclear?
> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.
France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.
Do note, though, that it was the unbelievable irresponsibility of past operators that has spurred the anti-nuclear movement in the first place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/929B8sgOOTM?si=FttZr_MsbQ1hB4Nj&t=1664 from 27:44 to 31:35.
> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death
How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?
Because they were useful idiots funded by fossil fuel companies.
(also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)
I'm not asking where they got funding. I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone. You don't find that strange at all?
The elites, powers that be, whatever you want to call them, had their own reasons for killing nuclear power. And nuclear's economics, compared to fossil fuels, didn't make it a slam dunk to adopt despite powerful opposition. So it had no one to defend it.
Environmentalists weren't just useful idiots then (and I hesitate to call people acting in good faith, without any self-interest, "idiots"). They're convenient fall guys today. The fossil fuel industry killed nuclear power and pinned it on the environmental movement. That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
> I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone
First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger.
> That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.
Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.
So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive. I'm certain there's ZERO correlation between regulations that make it expensive and regulations making it safe....................
So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?
> So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive
Yes, with extra steps.
Regulations, more so than their impact on price, cost calendar time.
Time, especially for already-lengthy and complicated infrastructure projects, costs volume.
And low volume means high prices and a slow pace of improvement.
Henry Ford wouldn't have built many automobiles, or improved them as quickly as he did, if every one needed to be individually permitted by multiple government agencies.
The failure of nuclear is that it never standardized and scaled to industrially-efficient volumes (outside of arguably France) at exactly the point that it could have technologically done so (~1970s). Had Offshore Power Systems^ begun producing floating reactors at volume in Jacksonville, FL in the late 70s, we'd be having a very different conversation about cheap American nuclear power today.
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems
there are regulations that make it safe and the ones that make it expensive. its two different groups. radiation limits and design safety with meltdown prevention is one thing but then you get rules like radiation needs to be as low as possible until you run into a cost limit. that basically means setting a price floor for the whole project.
nuclear being expensive is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. the costs for certified equipment are high because the market is small and not competitive, because nobodys building nuclear, because everyone knows its too expensive to build and not worth it.
the only solution i see is massive state investment like what france was doing in the 70s. that would upset the market purists but its more practical than trying to push the industry with a neoliberal hands off approach.
> The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has over 7,500 reactor years of cumulative reactor operation, and nuclear powered ships have steamed over 175 million miles. Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity to the environment which has adversely affected public health or safety.
https://www.nr-ha.org/history
> ... which has adversely affected public health or safety.
Why would they tack that on at the end of a very long sentence? Because they don't want to talk about the loss of USS Scorpion. They mention the sub once on the whole page and even misspell it as "Scorpian". Would not trust them as a source.
>Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity
None of the theories put forward about the loss of the USS Scorpion have involved the reactor. Maybe they didn't discuss it because it wasn't relevant?
> Would not trust them as a source.
Ok
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-06/Gray%20Bo...
Ah, yes - "the evil environmentalists." Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.
(As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)
Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.
France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
I mostly agree with your larger point, but the anti-nuclear movement predates the 70s by quite a bit.
> Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.
Who are we to begrudge a man his decade-long windmills-tilting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal.
But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.
A country can do things that are not financially viable.
Because it was paid for by the taxpayer.
Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?
> Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.
No need to run the world: in the last decades, some environmentalists have been lobbying against nuclear energy and in the end, the people in many countries have become opposed to it by fear of it. And that feared is fuelled (among others) by environmentalists for sure.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
If it's about comparing energies financially (and many other dimensions actually), nothing gets remotely close to oil. But oil is limited and oil is destroying the world.
Also not to forget: everything nowadays depends on globalisation and therefore oil. We like to compare renewables to oil, but we forget that they totally depend on oil at the moment. Without oil, we don't build much renewables anywhere. So an important question is: without oil, do we need nuclear energy or not? I believe we do. I believe we also need renewables, to be clear.
>environmentalists have choked it to death.
Those regulations you despise were written in blood.
Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it.
Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.
> If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.
An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent.
I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.
The effect environmentalists have on adoption is a rounding error compared to the humongous cost of nuclear power.
Most non nuclear powers have a few for the same reason Iran does: having some nuclear scientists and a developed nuclear industry around is handy in case of a, uh, geopolitical "emergency". This is why Poland suddenly became interested in 2023 specifically.
Most countries do not want a lot though - it's too expensive.
I agree, I also believe the overall startup cost and low ROI is more relevant than the occasional tree-hugger’s limited political influence.
Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap?
They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.
1. Nuclear has a negative learning curve. It’s gotten more expensive with time. Part of the reason is increasing geopolitical risks (the U.S. just launched a war on Iran because of the possibility it may upgrade nuclear material to weapon capabilities), lost knowledge and expertise, and also the increasing relative cost of financing in the cost of energy projects.
2. Nuclear was built at a time when governments were much more likely to directly invest in energy projects. It didn’t have to compete with Labubus for private dollars.
3. Its current competition didn’t exist, given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten, and how much cheaper battery tech has gotten with signs all of them will only get even cheaper. And on the non renewable side, natural gas has become incredibly cheaper as well.
> given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten
In a world with a lot of oil. How does that evolve when we don't have enough oil anymore?
Feels like renewables are extremely distributed, which sounds like it may be harder to manage without the happy globalisation brought by accessible oil.
To be clear, I believe we also need renewables. But I also believe that we won't remotely replace oil, so we need absolutely everything we can imagine, and that includes nuclear energy.
1. I personally believe the “lost knowledge “ is overstated. Europe knows very well how to manage large scale infrastructure projects. It still has a healthy nuclear industry.
2. Once the vote is there(Switzerland is a direct democracy), the public funds will be there. Sweden has recently chosen to invest ~40B Euro.
3. Solar, really? In Switzerland? Many parts of the industrialised world receive very little sun, especially in winter, where coincidentally, energy usage peaks.
And intermittent power generation like wind is no competition to nuclear.
These are very weak arguments. Good luck replacing Oskarshamn with solar panels…
What counts as "fast and cheap" ?
For the renewables "Fast and cheap" turns out to mean you get the paperwork in the winter and you build a solar farm that summer, it's not quite sowing wheat - teams of competent people building the farm isn't the same thing as just chucking the seeds into the dirt with a machine, but the timeframe isn't so different.
Sweden's nuclear plants seem to have taken maybe 6+ years from breaking ground (not paperwork) to first power, so if you begin today you might have a plant in 2032 at the earliest. I can't see any prices, not even a CfD strike price for Sweden's new proposed plants.
The UK agreed £92.50 strike price (2012 prices) for the new nukes it may never actually receive, but unlike Sweden the UK has never pledged to relinquish nuclear weapons so to some extent having a native "nuclear" capability is relevant to national security.
Process works if you keep building, expanding and making it safer. If you don’t build it for decades, you’re basically starting from scratch.
It is a hard sell when you have to front a good chunk of money, without a track record of successful build ups. It applies to other infrastructure stuff like HSR.
So let’s learn from that lesson and rebuild nuclear power in Europe?
Let’s hope Switzerland takes the lead here, Sweden are already building.
The political will is there. Let’s do it?
Fellow Swede here, what is crazy is I also learned this from this thread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France
The electricity sector in France is dominated by its nuclear power, which accounted for 71.7% of total production in 2018, while renewables and fossil fuels accounted for 21.3% and 7.1%, respectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
SVT or SR has never shown me this, wonder why...
And what is crazy is we, in Europe, act and talk as if we cannot do anything without sucking up to USA or China.
We also have massive Hydro in Sweden. We can see what is currently giving us electricity.
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/
oh and dont get us started on the electricity zones and germany...
Turn on Barsebäck again... absolute asenine they shut it down. Will never happen, been too long, also owned by Uniper... (Germans)
And sadly S+MP+V will win this election it looks like. Say goodbye to any new nuclear power. Also it will be 2015 all over again but that is off topic...
Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.
No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive.
It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition".
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
> the systems were just too expensive.
Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.
I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".
Your link says increased modulation adds 1.5-3.75 million euros/year in maintenance costs. That's utterly insignificant for the electricity supply to a nation of 70 million.
I really hope Swiss people learned a lesson from Germany and vote to build nuclear power plant. We need more investment in research on how to build safe, efficient power plants and ways of re-using spent nuclear fuel
One thing I want to mention about "safe" nuclear plants: dams are very, very big risks. Destroy a dam and see the result...
People are scared of nuclear plants in the same irrational way they are scared of terrorism. It doesn't kill much, but it is very scary.
What kind of environmental impact does hydro have in Switzerland? I’d expect it’s less because they are in the mountains.
I’m against a lot of Hydro power in the US because the environmental damage is high. Plus I like to fish and they have huge impacts on the ecosystems. But these are relatively flat places compared to Switzerland.
I didn't think about seasonality of hydro power. You might want french design then, they are the most effective as starting/shutting down.
I agree with you that you can't rely on hydro alone to power your country. It also seems like you're trying to be reasonable and suggest that any new nuclear production in your country needs to be done as ethically and environmentally friendly as possible.
Your statement about "We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time" really stood out to me.
Are Swiss folks maybe acting a bit NIMBY by not allowing nuclear in their own country, but are fine with buying French nuclear power? It seems a tad hypocritical to be against nuclear, while simultaneously using it as long as it's "not in my country".
Switzerland has nuclear reactors. They just stopped building new ones.
1. Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland?
2. The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years - what's the plan for managing it?
Yes energy generation (and independence) is important, no nuclear ain't it.
No country is going to bomb Switzerland because they all have money stashed here.
I wouldn’t pin the irrational discourse on the left. Pro nuclear people are just as k=1 thinkers as well. We just need long term policy not short term panic.
If there is any country that can safely build nuclear power plants, it is Switzerland.
Unless you drill holes into the outer containment hull.
What if you destroy a dam? It would be catastrophic too... but nobody votes against dams for some reason.
Whoosh. Holes -> Swiss Cheese.
> The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland
Does discourse from neighboring countries leak in as well? For example, German and Italian media's anti-nuclear sentiment versus French media's neutral to vaguely positive sentiment about nuclear.
French part of Switzerland is much more left leaning, so I can expect more anti-nuclear sentiment on this side. But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
But, Germany's decision after Fukushima to close down all nuclear reactors has had a strong impact on the 2017 votation that banned nuclear in Switzerland. So I guess the influence is there.
I'd see a lot more "nuclear no thanks" stickers in swiss German side than Romandie.
I'd expect the strong anti movement from Germany to have some impact.
> But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.
People aren't really partisan like that in Switzerland. They'll happily elect people from one party then vote against the party on specific issues in referendums or initiatives.
For something like nuclear, people who vote for green party might be mostly aligned with the party because it's a key issue for them while people who vote for center or right parties won't really care what the party recommends.
> the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for
Unless you personally agree with whatever your preferred party's line is on everything and generalize that sentiment, I'm not sure how to get to that conclusion.
I am member of the SP in Switzerland and I am pro nuclear.
I don’t know why we put people in political buckets. It’s good to disagree. I am probably the weird guy but so be it.
So French Swiss or German Swiss aren't going to be consuming French or German news media? If so that's refreshing compared to Canadians and Brits who constantly try to butt into American media and culture wars (eg. Rebel News, UnHerd) and vice versa (eg. X)
Switzerland's multilingual situation might look primed for a balkanized culture war, especially if you are coming from a place where that is common. But 1) it's a country of 10m people and 2) the national identity is centered around being unified despite language differences.
Of course people make jokes and remarks about "those people" who speak a different language. But "those people" are probably 1h away by train, are probably coworkers, and their language was taught in your school (even if some didn't bother to learn).
We have national media (German: srf, French/Italian: rts, Romanche: rtr), people consume that, and a few medias that have multiple language versions like 20minutes.
We also have a few language specific medias (German: NZZ, Tagesanzeiger, Blick, ..., French: Le Temps, 24 heures, La Liberté, ...), but I think most people consume Swiss media, especially when Swiss politics and local afairs are absolutely not covered by French and German medias.
The funny thing is that people know more about what is happening in the neighbouring countries than in the other parts of Switzerland. The "national" media is very divided and only covers French-speaking regions in French, German-speaking in German, etc. as if they were local media.
Switzerland is like that. I remember asking (in my best German) the person manning a ticket counter at Zurich train station if they spoke French once, if a look could kill I'd be dead, lol.
It gives the strange feeling that although they decided to create a country together they don't want to interact with each others unless absolutely necessary.
That's not it. Everyone in Zurich studies French at school, if you speak slowly to them in French, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (if they are familiar with the context of course). Similarly, if you speak slowly in German to a French-speaking Swiss, it's pretty likely that they will understand a lot of what you say (again, if they are familiar with the context).
It's just harder to speak in another language than to understand it, so if you ask someone to speak...
Next time, ask them if they understand French :-).
You could build the reactors inside the mountains to improve the security and effects of things like meltdowns.
Funny thing you mention that.
We had a nuclear meltdown in an experimental reactor in Lucens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor).
It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.
As if construction cost wasn't the biggest expense already.
"All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear"
This is like firefighters opposing using water.
The time for nuclear power was 50 years ago. And it's sad due to unfounded fears and coal interests there weren't more built. I would love if historically we had build more nuclear power plants. I am against it now because we have other safer, cheaper, and more sustainable options.
It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing:
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
- nuclear waste is not a problem
- nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors
- we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
There really is no excuse for people to be misinformed. If you actually want to understand this issue start here, but there are many other sources out there that can also help:
gordianknotbook.com
Or the substack:
substack.com/@jackdevanney
Biggest problem is that people not aware of how many closed down or not built nuclear power plants been replaced with coal power plants.
And coal kills more people in a week than all nuclear incidents killed in all history of humanity.
Not even mention that coal power plants release more radioactive materials too.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-saf...
Which nuclear plants were replaced with coal plants?
If you say "German plants", I'll point out coal consumption for power generation in Germany has gone down since the decision to phase out nuclear.
Coal consumption would likely have gone down even more with nuclear still being used, but that doesn't support your claim as stated.
The reason people are not aware of it is because it's utter tripe.
In the US, coal generation has been falling for twenty years because it's more expensive than wind and solar. Same reason nuclear is being phased out - grid operators can get power cheaper via wind, solar, import/export, and battery storage.
That may be true for the USA, but there's the rest of the world to consider. China and India were both increasing their coal generation year after year until, well, just this past year: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
I feel the same frustration but for the opposite reason. I am entirely confident you must be misinformed, not me.
I suggest you read actual bookkeeping statements from nuclear operators, national budget items, historical records about radiation incidents, nuclear deposits, agreement texts and the like, instead of reading books that can only be true if they adhere to the information in such sources.
- nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
It it is inherent to nuclear power, because you really need to spend the money and effort to keep it safe. It's very dangerous.
Here is where people usually say "but stats show it's killed fewer people per GWh generated than other sources". But that's not relevant at all. Nuclear power is dangerous entirely independently of that statistic. The reason so few have died is precisely that we spend all that money keeping it safe!
A gun is dangerous even before you shoot someone with it. It's not safe because nobody has shot it yet.
Science will tell you in detail what would happen if radioactive waste was spread in a populated area. There is so much information, please read up on it. So far it hasn't happened. Even Chernobyl was very far from a worst-case scenario.
- nuclear waste is not a problem
Of course it is. Malicious actors can kill millions with the amount of nuclear waste generated daily.
The US gov spends millions per year guarding abandoned nuclear waste. They don't do it for no reason.
Again, you need to realize that it is actually dangerous. That's why it's expensive. You need to spend LOTS of money to keep it safe.
- the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
Not even remotely true, some examples, from a very long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
People have died from radiation exposure every decade since it was discovered. People die from minutes of exposure to barely visible amounts of radioactive elements.
Please follow your inclination to be informed. Don't take my word, don't take Jacks, go to the records of actual events and base your opinion on that.
My take - In 2026 we have developed a type of glass that can fetch electricity entirely for free from sunshine and store it in a container of the most abundant element on earth, or even use the surplus carbon from the atmosphere to generate synthetic fuel that can store energy for years.
That's where we should spend time, money and effort.
Can you elaborate why waste is not a problem?
In 2015-2016 I did some mechanical engineering work at BWXT, designing nuclear waste containers for the Bruce Power CANDU reactor refurbishment program.
I learned that the spent fuel storage is pretty trivial for a few reasons:
1. The amount of fuel waste produced by a reactor is volumetrically tiny. So it's not too expensive to just have a relatively small guarded yard of sealed storage casks next to the reactor, where the fuel can sit and decay until safe for offsite disposal (typically around 60 years).
2. Safe waste storage containers are relatively easy to make. Most containers only need to be a thick stainless steel inner liner and a stainless steel outer liner filled with a special mixture of concrete. The nuclear waste is dropped in, the lid is bolted shut, then the container can be safely left in a guarded open yard for >100 years. They are safe by virtue of just having ridiculously thick welded stainless steel walls. We designed them to fall off a train going over a bridge, fall 300ft onto solid rock, and not break.
3. Reactor technology keeps getting better at extracting more energy from fuel. So what was "waste" in a past decade, can be put back into a reactor that is better at pulling energy out of the fuel. For this reason, there hasn't actually been much actual "fuel waste" in the history of the nuclear industry. It's all just being stored for future use by better reactors.
What about the waste inherent in decommissioning plants?
For the parts of the plant that cannot be put into landfill then storage like any other waste. Given how long they last, and how much energy they output, the waste is still very low per unit energy. Try this:
https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/gordi...
Why would you decommission them after all that investment instead of re-fitting? What would the ecological consequences would be if you demolished the Hoover Dam? Some things just have to be built to last as long as they physically can.
Ok, in my own words it's something like this:
- nuclear waste, after a period of the order of ~10e2/3 years is only dangerous if ingested. So it's as dangerous as any other poisonous substance after that point. There is no need for radiation shielding from that point.
- nuclear waste is very dense and so physical surface storage is cheap, and a solved problem (see: dry storage casks). We can fix leaks if/when they happen. Waste is concentrated
- current nuclear power stations (light water reactors) burn about 3% of their fuel leaving 97% unused in waste. There are nuclear power solutions which would burn most of the fuel (leaving very little for waste). So if we developed these technologies (see molton salt reactors being one of them) then nuclear waste would no longer be called "waste" as it would suddently become an extremely valuable feedstock for use in reactors.
- related to the prior point: why is it that we think we will not find a use for this very valuable and rare reasource in the future. We should think of nuclear "waste" storage as "rare element storage" which will be very useful under some states of the world. We just don't know how yet.
- as with any technology it should also be compared to the alternative when considering it's fitness: waste from the alternatives is far worse
~10e2/3 is a very unclear what of writing whatever number you're trying to write
100-1000 years order of magnitude. I can't remember exactly, but it's well within our ability to engineer and manage, rather than the signs that try to answer the "how do we communicate danger to later species" types of timelines
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/600-year-old-spent-nucle...
They could do what the fossil fuel industry does and just disperse it into the atmosphere until it disappears behind background radiation.
Realistically deep geologic storage is absolutely fine, and even if it's not happening now, all of the waste can be safely stored above ground for hundreds of years.
After the Fukushima disaster, radioactivity was detected in the seawater off the west cost of America. This, of course, threw people into a panic, despite being detectable only with very sensitive equipment and was not a danger to anyone or anything.
To be more specific, you would not have been able to detect Fukushima waste based on radioactivity, as the radioactivity would not have been detectable above the normal background radiation.
They could only identify the waste by it's distinct radiological profile. Otherwise it was just another source amongst millions of ionizing radiation that bathes us every day.
Here's a decent page outlining how the industry deals with waste:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
Basically, nuclear waste from power generation is a much smaller problem than people assume it to be, the solutions for managing it are already in place, and there have been few/if any accidents that have ever caused contamination from waste disposal.
Also I'm not an industry shill, but orphan sources from industrial/medical radiography have killed and injured more people than nuclear plants and their waste. Yet there's hardly the amount of opposition to those systems that you see for nuclear power, despite nuclear power having a far more significant impact on the healthiness and stability of global populations if we stopped banning it.
The only fair way to compare the cost to solar and wind, is if wind and solar producers would have to make power guarantees 24/7 and cover the cost of the production gaps (hint: this makes solar and wind very expensive).
Not sure if that's fair. Sometimes the sun actually does shine, and while you won't get rich selling energy during that time, having electricity available essentially for free during some of the peak hours is worth something. Someone will eventually find a use for free energy. If nothing else, at least we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.
> we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.
Those plants are not designed to be turned on and off, and both must be done gradually and carefully to avoid cracking the turbines.
When the sun shines sure you can power down other power stations, but you still need to maintain them and have them around for when the sun doesn't shine. So when you have lots of intermittent energy it means that you actually cannot shelve your old technology - you still have to maintain it, but now you're paying for the maintenance over less capacity used. This is only one of the reasons why prices are going up in heavy renewable grids.
If only that were not just the start of the issue. Regulation means nuclear is probably an order of magnitude more expensive than it could be.
> - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power
Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.
Solar panels, wind, and batteries have all dropped in price so much that solar backed by batteries to create stable powers (and/or wind doing the same, or a mix), is in the vast majority of the world vastly cheaper than nuclear.
> - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors
All of which are fundamentally expensive.
> - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more polluted, higher CO2 world, because of all the people that choose to not inform themselves about the truth on nuclear
Every kw of nuclear production we create is resources we could have instead put into adding more than 1 kw of solar backed with batteries at this point. Moreover the other renewables would come online and displace fossil fuel usage faster. Thus spending money on nuclear results in a more polluted higher CO2 world, not the other way around.
There was a time when nuclear was the cheapest way to build clean energy, that time has passed and isn't coming back.
> - the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero, and require large exposure to be non-zero
Many people have died from radiation exposure. Many people have gotten cancer from radiation exposure years later. Many many square kilometers of earth have been rendered uninhabitable by distribution of radioactive isotopes. This is misinformation and spreading it is frankly dangerous. A very healthy dose of respect is required whenever handling radioactive materials and people should not be told otherwise.
> Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.
The actual operating costs are extremely low. Most of the cited $/kwh figures include the capital costs of the extreme 10+ year approval process. There's also no economies of scale right now.
If you add up all of the deaths directly from radiation exposure in the nuclear power industry it's literally 31 - and 28 came from Chernobyl. It's a fraction of rounding error compared to every other energy type.
Nearly all of the dangers of radiation were cooked up by the oil and gas industry based on a series of now discredited fruit fly studies in the 1950s.
Chernobyl killed 31 directly (i.e. acute radiation poisoning), and thousands indirectly (i.e. cancer) though the count for that is disputed... I don't know where your 28 number comes from but there's no dispute that the direct number is higher than that...
There's been a handful of other purely civilian disasters that killed people with radiation from sources meant for nuclear power, and a large number of military ones.
But if we're looking for civilian radiation deaths the majority outside of Chernobyl aren't nuclear power, they're radiotherapy, because the nuclear power industry was appropriately regulated after the early mass casualty events resulting from military nuclear reactors (e.g. the Kyshtym disaster at 200 to 8000 deaths) and the Windscale Fire at (100 to 240 deaths) and it's harder to regulate the more wildly distributed health care applications.
That we're handling things with appropriate care isn't evidence that they're not dangerous.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-is-too-expensive
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/what-is-nuclears-should-...
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-case-for-1-msv-per-d...
Batteries cost > $100 / kWh, the industry still considers that a target to brag about: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/lithium-ion-...
This is WHOLESALE BOM price, which is about as useful as the price of uranium.
That is horrifically expensive.
$100 / kWh capacity, over 10000 cycles, is $0.01 kWh delivered. It's dirt cheap.
Also that's not the cost though. You're looking at vehicle packs not stationary storage packs at that cost. We've seen stationary storage packs get down to $50/kWh last year - with an average pack price of $70: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...
And prices continue to decay. Those are the most expensive prices you'll ever see going forwards.
And there's other benefits. Batteries distribute well, letting us lower grid related costs by making more constant use of the chokepoints in the grid for instance.
Could you please read the resources above that debunk the points you just made?
What choices make nuclear expensive that we could actually get rid of WITHOUT IMMEDIATELY increasing risk (which is low because of regulation)?
Moreover, it's crazy that so much regulation was provably written in blood paid by workers and public after a company got greedy. Sure, let's build 50 AND reduce regulations.
Finally, the biggest fucking thing: It is MORE expensive NOW than the green alternatives, AND green energy has proven over the years to actually keep it's promises of improvements, compared to fission and SMRs, which are always just 5 years away.
Renewables have been incredibly effective at providing more capacity at good cost, but they still have drawbacks. Aside from the obvious variability everyone harps on, location does play a nontrivial role. Switzerland is not as good a candidate for solar or wind as many other countries due to constraints in usable land and availability (valleys have more shade than steppes for instance). I don’t think anyone needs to be saying no to renewables when they consider investing in nuclear. The two technologies serve very different purposes in an electric grid. Base load is still a problem even with battery storage, and it makes a lot of sense to have reliable power available that is not from fossil fuels to deal with that demand. There is plenty of fossil fuel based generation to replace, it doesn’t have to all be nuclear or renewables, in fact all one or the other doesn’t make much sense.
It’s true nuclear is expensive. It’s also true a lot of that expense was the regulation that has made it so incredibly safe. It’s unlikely a cheaper but still safe enough compromise will be reached in countries with existing regulatory structures quickly, but there is certainly room to improve over time.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/how-can-nrc-style-regula...
The Gordian Knot and Jack Devanney's website is a goldmine of information which will address almost any question anybody has on the subject.
I have a better list:
* every dollar spent on building new nuclear will be put to use so late it effectively increases CO2 emissions
* A country like Poland is the biggest emissions perpetrator in Europe, and the fact they are building nuclear means they will stay that way for literally decades
* The fossil fuel exporter countries are pushing nuclear as their agenda. Why do you think that is?
* Not a single country has a working permanent solution currently for waste storage.
* The UK cannot clean up Sellafield at all. They had the bright idea to process waste and are now sitting in hundreds of billions of pounds of estimated costs to dispose of it.
> the harms from radiation exposure are mostly precisely zero
You had me until this. “Mostly precisely”? What does that even mean man?
The reason is that your body has mechanisms to fix the problems of radiation. For example, when you drop a stone in water would you say that you "break the surface of the water"?
Our DNA is very similar - DNA damage occurs naturally. Our body has processes that fix DNA strand breaks. Radiation that occurs because of most exposure that has ever occurred is so minimal that the body's natural defences against radiation damange means that the harm is precisely zero. The body literally repaired itself much like that water surface repairs itself.
Harm does occur however when the rate of radiation exposure exceeds our body's ability to repair itself. However this threshold is well above any threshold we regulate around.
For more information the key words are "dna double strand breaks" and "LNT vs SNT"
I read it thusly: not "(mostly precisely) zero" but "mostly (precisely zero)"
i.e in most reasonable cases the risk is exactly zero and conversely it takes extreme scenarios for the risk to be non-zero.
Yes, we know nuclear is actually super great, because of all the merchant nuclear plants that have been built around the world.
Here is a complete list of those plants:
Nuclear used to be built cheaply, before regulatory uncertainty made private construction effectively impossible:
https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/essay...
Nuclear energy is really the energy of the future, fission still has bright days ahead of it. the startup market for SMRs is going to boom once the core challenges will have been solved, sure that we will see many ETH founders go into that world
Every SMR startup is failing. The more they progress, the more they revise their costs upwards.
SMR make as much sense as space datacenters. You can gaslight investors, you can gaslight HN, you can gaslight a national parliament full of lobbyists, but you can't gaslight thermodynamics.
> Every SMR startup is failing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586648
Have you read the comments?
What are the challenges they face?
One is regulatory. At least in the US, every nuclear reactor that produces at least 100 MW needs to carry a 375 million dollar insurance policy at minimum. Under 100 MW there is an alternate schedule that ranges from 5 million to 75 million scaling based on output. But the net result is that it's still more profitable to built a single large reactor, since a 1 GW reactor is less to insure than 10 100 MW reactors. This is written into law, it would require Congress to change it.
Second is that nuclear reactor efficiency tends to improve with size. The ratio of thermal watts to electric watts tends to be better with large reactors. I'm not super well versed on the engineering tradeoffs here by my rough understanding is that waste heat scales with surface area while useful energy extraction scales with volume.
In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't seem to be too expensive. According to the NRC, insurance is per site, and additional reactors on a site don't increase the insurance nearly as much as the first. The example they give is $1.1 million annual premium for a $500 million policy, with multi-reactor sites going up to $1.5 million. They also mention property insurance ($1.06 billion policy) and they didn't discuss the premiums on that, but as it's not liability insurance it's probably cheaper.
The big costs are still going to be the cost of siting and building the reactor, the fuel, and the ongoing cost of running it. They pay off over a very long time horizon, so it's also the opportunity cost.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
Doesn’t China have SMRs?
Just one so far and it's not particularly small compared to a more conventional reactor.
Russia actually does have a smallish SMR but it wasn't terribly cheap to build nor operate. IIRC it is in the form of a ship and used to power a city somewhere in the north.
SMR has a place for sure but no one has demonstrated the unit costs savings of making a lot of them yet.
You can actually get some, if not most, of the economy of scale by doing a fleet build of one specific design. The US seems to be working on that and picked the Westinghouse AP-1000. I think that initiative has a decent chance of succeeding. The first few will be slow and expensive to build (even China has had delays with their nuclear roll out) but the subsequent ones will get cheaper and faster to build. This is how some countries did it during the first nuclear power expansion era.
How are SMR's "gaslighting themodynamics"? I mean, sure, I can accept that they're not economical with current tech, but it's not a frigging' perpetuum mobile, it's feasible technology.
Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical. A bigger nuclear reactor will always undercut your price per watt.
> Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical.
And the link between thermodynamics and the price of electricity is what?
Your small nuclear reactor is going to need almost as much engineering , plumbing, safety mechanism, personnel, maintenance, etc... as your big nuclear reactor.
Not if it's mass produced
Let's distribute the risk everywhere, what could go wrong?
The value propositions of SMRs are logistics and re-use of existing infrastructure. The idea is that you could have easily transportable reactors that you can plop down in an existing coal plant, and then reuse the turbine, dynamo, etc. that are already in place.
The fact that we haven't seen more widespread use of SMRs suggests that you're right. But it's important to point out that there are cost saving opportunities that could potentially reduce the net price per watt despite worse thermodynamic efficiency.
The mindset that makes people stuck in time. Sorry but SMRs are potentially very cheap. Not at this point. ,but when operated on scale they will be. You need to start
"SMR make as much sense as space datacenters."
So a whole lot of sense given the entire US Navy uses them and I already have one datacenter operating up in space (small test unit that over 3 months has provided ZERO issues) and a bigger one heading up into orbit next year when it's done being made.
"but you can't gaslight thermodynamics"
No but you can certainly conflate them like you're doing right now.
The Navy uses highly enriched uranium for its reactors, something like 70-80% enrichment. This is a non starter for civilian use, on account of proliferation concerns. That, and the enrichment requirements drive up fuel costs.
Naval reactors use HEU specifically so that humans can live and work in close proximity for long periods of time.
Land-based deployments don't have this constraint.
>the entire US Navy uses them
Is the business of the US Navy to sell electrity on the market?
You are the one conflating things that have absolutely no connections.
"Is the business of the US Navy to sell electrity on the market?"
No but they do use those reactors to power areas in times of disaster relief.
Ok, this is interesting. I am skeptic about DC's in space, but I do appreciate people actually doing stuff. What is it computing up there. How did you get it up? How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary.
"What is it computing up there."
Hyperspectral satellite imagery - think ASTER/LANDSAT/MODIS but more modern, for surficial minerals study.
"How did you get it up?"
How else? Paid a rocket company to launch it into orbit after proving various flightworthiness tests and getting various certifications and permissions from relevant gov't authorities.
"How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary."
K-band. Don't need tons of power, just a good LoS from ground on your target. And yea, not Geostat, I'm in LEO.
Yes, SMRs probably have a small niche market on military-adjacent applications.
>SMR make as much sense as space datacenters.
you are in this thread a lot, so i am guessing you must be very familiar with the industry. maybe you can help me understand:
is the wikipedia on SMRs incorrect/lying when they say that there are commercially operating SMRs since 2020?
and how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
>commercially operating
And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money.
>how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
Or solar.
And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
Nuclear attracts clever people, but it isn't smart nor wise.
I think you have a misunderstanding of what a SMR is supposed to be.
Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to deploy and cost will be significantly reduced.
We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs and have been for a very long time. Off the top of my head ship power has been exported to local areas for disaster relief
Solar is absolutely fantastic and your average person should not be hawking at solar for your home to offset your power bill. The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.
I don't think the likes of Westinghouse, Siemens, Rolls Royce and GE are duped. They are trying to solve a very hard problem!
>The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.
Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have?
For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop?
This is such a silly argument. Battery and solar technologies are progressing regardless of people building nuclear. It's simply not the case that we can stop investing in nuclear and use that money to accelerate battery/solar.
The best energy strategies are all-of-the-above.
> For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop
This is a horrible argument. Yeah, let’s not spend money improving technology. We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.
Efficiency is not the problem. We have plenty of nuclear fuel.
>'taylor-made' Says it all, doesn't it
>Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics.
true, you said "gaslight thermodynamics", which i have no idea what that means, so i took a guess at what you were implying.
>never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
is efficiency really the only metric to be considered? i feel like available space, availability of alternatives, time to complete construction, etc. are worthwhile to consider.
>And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments worldwide considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania. but i am not an expert. you are talking like you are one, which is why i am asking questions.
>i feel like available space, time to complete construction
All of these favor again bigger reactors.
>considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania.
All of the Swiss energy companies are asking to be bailed out in advance of the investment in nuclear.
Sweden recently did the same: in order for companies to agree to make new reactors, the government had to promise them a price floor for the electricity they produce. The price floor suggested is more than twice the current price on the spot market. That means that, for the lifetime of those reactors, Swedish taxpayers will be subsidizing production of nuclear power. I thought the idea was that they would be profitable? What happened to the political right’s love of the free market? When politicians go fixing prices with this kind of ”advance bailout”, it just makes it look like they are trying to get a nice retirement job in the nuclear power sector…
Base load generation.
Yes, we have hydro.
Wind is way too unpredictable, solar is too.
So, we can only have 2 powers to provide base load in Sweden.
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/
>All of these favor again bigger reactors.
how does having less available space favor a bigger reactor?
and how is constructing a bigger reactor faster than constructing a smaller one?
There are two ways of achieving economies of scale: making things bigger or making more of them.
For small quantities, the former is usually more effective -- making things bigger lets you make fewer of them, reducing costs.
For large quantities, a factory can enable insane economies of scale.
SMR proponents are talking about building dozens of reactors. That fits very firmly in the "small quantity" column where economies of scale almost always favor building things bigger.
If you need 500 MW, you build one 500 MW reactor, not five 100 MW reactors. They will take more space.
As for speed, a 100 MW reactor is not commissioned in 1/5 of the time a 500 MW reactor is.
I think the promise of SMR is that the 1/5th reactor can be built in 1/2 the time. And you build five of them in parallell. And you have your power sources gradually online over about the same time as one ”big bang” build would take.
I don’t think it’s going to work out that way, but that’s how it’s being sold.
Even like that, it is not clear-cut. 1/5 in 1/2 the time is still 2.5 shorter per worker, and building in parallel require multiplying expert builders, which is not easy (as it takes time to acquire the expertise and you don't want to learn a trade to build one project and have nothing to do next).
But, yes, I get it is how it is sold. Just that even sold like that, people with common sense should say "wait a minute, that's obviously not that simple".
Just a guess (I'm not the previous user), but I guess you need to look at the space _per GWh_?
If a big nuclear reactor takes 10x more space but has 20x more capacity, then it means not having much space favors the big nuclear reactor rather than building 10 small ones that will take twice more space.
(and same for the time)
its probably my fault for not making myself clear. i mean when the available space is constrained to a specific amount of space that cannot be exceeded.
just picking random numbers:
i have 1 square mile available. a big reactor takes 4 square miles. i cannot fit a big reactor, despite the bigger reactor being more efficient.
well, I don't think that there is a real problem of "1 square mile is available but not 4 square miles" (this is a different sentence than "there is not enough space"). Especially as small reactor also need to be placed very specifically. So even then, it is still possible that the advantage is for big nuclear plant, as they are still more compact per GWh.
>"1 square mile is available but not 4 square miles" (this is a different sentence than "there is not enough space").
how are these different? one is an example, one is general, but they communicate the exact same point. if you have something that requires 4 sq. miles, you cannot fit it into a place that is 1 sq. mile in size because there is not enough space to fit it.
>as they are still more compact per GWh.
i am really struggling here... if i cannot fit something large, whether the large thing is "more compact per GWh" does not matter. i only have so much physical space to work with. if its too big, its too big.
for a more easily visualized example, you cannot fit a reactor from three mile island into a submarine. efficiency doesnt come into the equation, because physical space constraints get in the way first.
There's no measure by which nuclear energy is the "energy of the future". It's too complex, too expensive and it doesn't scale. SMRs are proving to be a fever dream with ever rising costs and the number of nuclear reactors in operation is decreasing year by year and both Wind and PV are now each producing more electricity than nuclear.
Nuclear has had its moment. That moment is gone.
PWRs are not really that complicated. They are just very hot metal rods inside a thick steel pressure vessel that boil water to make steam.
"Nuclear has had its moment. That moment is gone."
When CO2 caused climate changed is posed to be civilization altering this is a very very foolish thing to say.
Shutting down nuclear power plants prematurely was very foolish (looking at you Germany). But other than that, it’s true.
When you boil the issue down to the fundamental facts, our challenge is simply: add as much power production as fast as possible. We have no other hope to tackle the issue but to optimise for this. Nuclear is a dangerous distraction. Solar+wind is now growing faster than nuclear ever did at its peak and they’re showing no signs of slowing down. It’s the only way to get more power fast enough.
We are building power for a future where we cut all CO2 emissions. Not just those from electricity. Our second biggest priority (well third after EVs, but I’m not too worried about EVs right now, it’s a self sustaining transition) is to bring down the capital costs of hydrogen plants. That’s the key to bringing down CO2 emissions in several sectors of industry. This pairs perfectly with variable power. We’ve already seen green ammonia fertiliser plants paired with renewables and now with the Iran crisis there will be higher pressure to build more of them to be self sustained. This way also lets us distribute production which is nice to be less vulnerable in case of war.
Once green hydrogen production has reached critical mass, and growth of renewables have pushed gas power plants into more of a backup role, with low fuel consumption, they will naturally switch to hydrogen. Many of the newer ones are already ready for hydrogen and others have an upgrade path. Perhaps hydrogen consuming industry will co-locate with gas power plants to share production/storage infrastructure. This path has very low capital costs besides the ones we anyway need to make the hydrogen necessary to decarbonise industry. The gas power plants are already built in most countries that will need them.
That's a foolish thing to say because building enough nuclear, even with the fairy tale prices and times people make up, would take soooo much longer and cost sooo much more than green energy.
Even more importantly, it's very hard to compromise and downscale a project when the inevitable fossil fuel lobbyists vote against you. It's a lot easier to half a solar park project than a nuclear project.
Nuclear energy is still turning water to steam, no really future like.
Turning sun light to electricity on the other hand is more that
The fissile elements and the oxygen that makes up water already came from stars.
I wish Italy did the same.
We still have to deal with the consequences of a referendum hold not so long after che Chernobyl accident which made it illegal to build and operate nuclear power plants.
> I wish Italy did the same.
They are in the process. Last I checked the bill to do so had passed the lower house and how needs to get ratified by the senate.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/italian-bill-on-...
It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries. You even have the industrial prowess to make it all in the country step by step, whereas nuclear reactors are such humongous engineering projects that building the capacity is very out of reach.
Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how are you going to cool down your reactors? Nuclear in Italy is a non-starter.
Solar, wind, and even hydroelectricity are too dependent upon the environment to make up the entire electricity generation capacity of any major industrial country. With renewables, even with batteries, the actual production is within a range. Couple that with demand also being in a range you get uncomfortable possibilities at play. And while colder water is definitely preferable for cooling, I'd have to imagine that if the bodies of water were actually becoming too hot to cool a nuclear reactor system there'd be bigger problems than energy production.
The limit is not how cold the water needs to be for the power plant, but how hot it can be for the river ecology to not take (too much) damage. Even in Germany power plants regularly need to be shut down.
> 2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to shut down their nuclear power plants partly or fully because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm (Barber, 2022; Limb, 2022; Miller and Vladkov, 2022). Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature (European Parliament and European Council, 2000; IKSR, 2022b). The resulting unplanned outages — and the efforts by nuclear operators to avoid such disruptions — highlight pressing concerns about the sustainability of nuclear energy, particularly its impact on river ecosystems in an increasingly warming world (see Fig. 1).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...
> It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries
Do you have any trustable source for this?
I'd say "Supplementary Information for Strategic deployment of solar photovoltaics for achieving self-sufficiency in Europe throughout the energy transition"[1] fits the bill. It lays out various paths to 100% renewables (which in Italy, like in Spain, is heavily solar) by 20250
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61492-9.pdf
Just look at any map of solar power potential, solar irradiance, hours of sunshine of Europe.
I think the question is more about the "and batteries" part than about the sunshine part.
Exactly
Latitude?
Why not both?
We still need rotating mass to keep the grid stable, which means either building giant flywheels, keep burning gas or bring nuclear into the mix.
One of these can also produce a ton of energy when needed, the other two cant.
We can and should build more renewables, but we can't risk grid stability!
It's technically possible to replace rotating mass with batteries using a "grid-forming inverter", which is an inverter that converts the battery DC to AC with frequency varying depending on the grid load, simulating how that rotating mass would behave ("synthetic inertia"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource#Grid-f...
This competes with the traditional giant flywheel option ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser ), which has the advantage of being a simple and proven technology, and handling brief overload better, but the disadvantage of having moving parts. It's not clear which option is currently best. Both are in current use.
And as a third answer: You actually don't need to take the flywheels of the power plants offline, when you take the rest of the power plant down. The locations for them are perfect, as the whole grid has historically been build around them.
We actually don’t need those anymore. Grid forming inverters and batteries will take over that role.
It's a world-wide competition to generate the most expensive electricity! The record is currently held by Vogtle in Georgia US, but Ontario Canada is trying to take the crown by spending $500B on nuclear.
Is there a cleaner, more consistent technology for baseload?
At a certain point, dollars are funny money if you are destroying the environment to save a few now by generating baseload with a carbon-producing tech.
Of course, let’s build the safest and most efficient nuclear that we can, but “its capex is too high” is not a compelling argument to me.
And to be clear: renewables should form as much of the capacity as possible, but a reliable baseload is obviously still needed.
"Baseload" is load, not generation. It's not necessary -- for example the small northern grids that only have diesel generators operate fine even though they have no generators that don't have the capacity for quick cycling.
Baseload was a cost optimization. Back in the day it was cheaper to build coal & nuclear plants that took days to power on. Somebody figured out that if a grid was built of a mix of those cheaper plants and more expensive plants that could start up quicker, it would lower costs. The typical grid was baseload coal and gas peakers. But ~20 years ago gas peakers became cheaper than baseload coal and any need or desire for baseload generation went away.
China is building a lot of coal plants to complement their solar buildout. Notably these are not base load plants. Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night.
Similarly, many new nuclear plant designs are not base load designs; they are designs that can be safely and quickly turned on and off.
P.S. the correct term for generation is "non-dispatchable", not "baseload"
> Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night
That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it need not be. In this case, China is building coal plants to address the baseload that doesn’t go away at night when the solar isn’t producing.
Note that China has started building battery banks at massive scale recently.
Is china building new coal plants or not?
Do you want to hazard a guess as to why?
The answer is because we still do not know how to supply expanding electricity demand with wind, solar and batteries. The side of the story that people on this website love to bring up is the fact that China happens to be the largest builder of solar and wind, which is true, but the increased electricity demand is being met via coal, for the most part.
> Do you want to hazard a guess as to why?
Because it was only in 2025 that batteries became cheaper than coal, so the lead times involved mean they are still building coal.
They're very rapidly ramping up battery bank installation, it's too early to tell if they're also ramping down coal plant installations, but it seems likely.
we don't need reliable "base load" but peakers - with more renewables more than ever.
Baseload won't be price competitive with renewables in average or shiny/windy conditions ever
you'll be so happy about being price competitive when the conditions are bad for like a week and the country just doesn't run (or rely on other countries price gouging you for what your country needs to exist.)
Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible hand of the market hoping that price competitiveness means that it works well. Lives are at play.
> You need both
Why do you need both? It's possible to get 99.99% reliability with wind & solar & batteries & weather modelling. There are multiple ways to handle a week long dankelflaute without nuclear: overbuilding, continental scale distribution, lots of batteries, etc. All are cheaper than nuclear.
It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid, even a nuclear dominated one. Local distribution has many single points of failure.
The marginal cost of batteries grows more than linearly.
When batteries are covering 0% of the need, the marginally added battery cycles many times, so the cost is spread over many kwh produced.
When you add batteries to go from 99.98 to 99.99, the batteries cycle only for that 0.01, so the same cost to build them is spread over a much fewer kwh, making each kwh produced a lot more expensive.
Seasonal storage is madness: you charge once and discharge once per year. Pay 100$/kwh to install it, discharge 20 times (20 years, a 5% payback time, which is a bad investment), and you're paying those kwh a 5$/kwh premium on top of the cost of buying the discharged power. If the battery is instead installed to shift the production from 12.00 to 18.00, it cycles 365 times a year, so in 20 years the premium is 0.01$/kwh.
So nucleare doesn't compete with the first 40% of penetration of renewables and the first 30% of battery, it competes with the last 10%, which is still needed to get to 0.
Per Ember Energy reports, a cost optimal new build grid is between 90% - 97% solar/wind/battery, and between 3% to 10% gas peaker depending on how much sun/wind your locale gets.
But you can't replace the gas peaker with 3% or 10% nuclear because in essence that gas peaker is supplying 100% of the power 3% to 10% of the time.
So you'd have to build nuclear plants that can supply 100% of the power. But once you have that you might as well use nuclear power 100% of the time because the rest is irrelevant. But that's about as far from cost-optimal as you can get.
As you mentioned, using batteries for seasonal storage is madness. So to get to 100% carbon free you have at least 2 other options:
1. use a different form of seasonal storage. China is experimenting with this. In 2026 they will double the world's pumped hydro storage capacity. But doubling isn't a lot -- the world doesn't have much pumped hydro. But it does mean they might start doing it at China scale in a few years.
2. Overbuild to avoid the need for seasonal storage. Solar works on cloudy days and in the winter. It just doesn't work very well. So you need a lot of it. Which is expensive, but still a heck of a lot cheaper than batteries for seasonal storage.
In reality, most places will probably say that 95% or 99% carbon reduction is good enough and keep their backup natural gas generators around for the occasional dankelflaute.
How much do those batteries cost and can they supply power for multiple days or a season if your renewable sources aren't providing like normal?
Not to mention the environmental damage from producing and disposing of batteries.
I agree, there are better options for mass scale long term energy storage than batteries, e.g. (green) hydrogen, methane
Pumped hydro is currently the cheapest long term energy storage by a significant amount.
No. Nuclear is neither price competitive, nor is it available quick enough.
Go fully renewable. Add batteries, like Google is doing. Just one example: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/24/google-to-deploy-worl...
That competition is handily won by wind and solar.
In the meantime in Switzerland:
"Our cheapest electricity product is nuclear electricity."
https://ewr.ch/elektrizitaet/stromprodukte/
Yes, if you put the cost of commissioning and decommissioning the reactor onto your taxpayers instead of including it in the cost of power, nuclear can be very cheap. I didn't try and translate the German ; but that's the trick Ontario Canada uses to false claim that nuclear power is cheap.
That turns out not to be the case.
The prices are all-inclusive.
Existing nuclear power plants can be very cheap at $30 – $40 / MWh
New nuclear power plants would be much more expensive at $180 / MWh or more, due to strict modern regulations. Even with these regulations, there is no nuclear plant that is safe against a terrorist crashing an airplane into it.
The unsolved permanent repository problem is left to future generations.
Finally, building a new nuclear power plant will easily take a decade or more.
Cool, the price of solar right now is $30-$85 / MWh, and that range is dependent on whether you got storage included in the bill or not.
And that price will only get cheaper, as both the US and China continue ramping up production.
Nuclear? It would need to reduce its costs by 70% to get where solar is now. And then do it again to be competitive with where solar+storage will be in 10 years.
Nuclear is economically a dead technology.
UK is trying really hard with its reactors too.
Sizewell C, its £38bn current price tag is looking very very shaky - £60bn final cost wouldn't surprise me. And our electricity bills are going up again in order to help fund it. Lovely
This is going to be a huge waste of time and money until we realize that building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then. Instead we could also just join a French project, who have way more experience.
We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.
There will be a referendum anyways, so I think it's unlikely the ban will actually be lifted.
"I expect they're too expensive" is a terrible reason to ban them, though.
It is when it's tied to "and I expect they're going to ask for giant subsidies from taxpayers".
Which nuclear inevitably does, both in the form of direct requests for money and by refusing to pay for adequate insurance to compensate everyone who will be damaged in the event of a meltdown externalizing the risks.
If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper.
(I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)
That's not why they were banned, and in any case lifting a ban on building something that nobody will build doesn't seem like good use of legislators time.
At least one Kanton has already requested a new build.
https://www.nuklearforum.ch/de/news/neues-kernkraftwerk-im-a...
> we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then
That's a very, very risky bet you're taking here. We know nuclear energy really well, and you're suggesting we ignore it for something that we will "figure out" later. Meanwhile the clock is ticking.
> We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.
This is so limited that it's not at all an alternative, though.
Hydro power is often brutal for the local environment. There has been a whole lot of expensive and careful undoing of hydro power around the world in recent years in attempt to save various local species from extinction. There are second order effects too like how silt is typically deposited in an unblocked vs blocked waterway and what that means for downstream land or water quality.
> building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then.
That's a helluva prediction.
Thorium reactors would be practically limitless in fuel supply, but we aren't getting them without seriously funded nuclear research. That is far less likely during a band on commercial stations.
>Thorium reactors
The same reactors nuclear powers with decades of experience haven't deployed?
We will get two or three revolutions in solar power and battery technology before a single thorium reactor is viable. You could invest all the R&D budget of thorium reactors in perovskite panels and it would generate more MW per CHF invested.
Citizens should take note that no nuclear plants are ever built without many billions in state loans and guarantees.
It's not a cheap source of electricity, it's a way for someone to get money from taxpayers to subsidize their business.
You should take note that you’re uninformed or intentionally spreading false information and misrepresenting reality.
Fact of the matter is it takes a large upfront investment to build a nuclear reactor and it has a longer time horizon before it becomes profitable in comparison to something like a gas or coal power plant.
It comes down to whether or not the country, government, citizens and country have the ability to think beyond a 4 year horizon or not.
Everybody knows about the upfront cost, but the size and long tail of costs after the plant has been built, or when unforeseen events occur, is largely hidden from all financial statements. So much so that people actually believe that nuclear power is cheap, when it's not.
But the truth surfaces of course - you can look at the financials of EDF in France (nationalized in 2022 with 60+ bn euros in debt), KEPCO in Korea (145 bn in debt), or incidents like Asse II in Germany, Sellafield in the UK, Rancho Seco in the US.
Billions of taxpayer money covering costs caused by the nuclear industry, and not appearing anywhere in any statement of estimates of nuclear power costs. Large, double-digit plant operators basically or literally bankrupt.
Different CEOs of the swedish electric company Vattenfall have stated repeatedly that nuclear power is not viable unless the state pays. Here is a recent such statement: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/swedis...
This to me is the bottom line. If nuclear power was cheap and profitable, people would be in line to build them as soon as they get approval! Instead, they want money.
The truth is that the industry sees no way to profitability here, except when they get access to current and future taxpayer money. This has always been the case for nuclear power and still is.
This argument cherrypicks legacy cleanup sites and distressed utility balance sheets, then treats them as proof that nuclear electricity is inherently uneconomic.
The real issue is narrower: new nuclear is capital intensive and hard to finance without long term revenue guarantees, while old waste sites can impose large public cleanup costs.
Decommissioning and waste are included in serious cost models and regulatory funding requirements, existing nuclear life extensions can be among the cheapest firm low carbon power sources, and KEPCO/EDF’s debts reflect tariff policy, fuel shocks, outages, state interventions, and investment cycles. Not simply “nuclear power is unprofitable.”
The honest conclusion is that nuclear needs strong regulation and disciplined project delivery, not that nuclear is categorically fake-cheap.
Aka what I said earlier: you need the ability for strategic long term thinking and planning and execution.
Show us just a single NPP that is properly insured
Slovenia - Krško nuclear power plant.
I leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.
What about insurance though?
There's no false information there. Nuclear is complex and so expensive that despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel. It's also slow, with building times up to more than a decade.
France tried it. Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives, makes about €3 billion per year in profits and has to invest about €150 billion in new reactors, upgrades, refits and infrastructure.
Nuclear is just not worth the hassle.
It always amuses me when nuclear power is the one area where the left becomes Very Concerned about excessive government spending.
despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel
Except for France which came up with the clever strategy of "not banning it", but that was apparently a mistake and they should have just used fossil fuels?
Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives
€50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
I'm not actually that concerned about excessive government spending. I just don't like wasteful spending, and that's what nuclear is.
Wind and PV build up much faster, are orders of magnitudes less complex and provide cheaper electricity.
There is just no reason to build nuclear.
> €50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.
No, that €50 billion is just what EDF is in the reds. The actual cost is much, much higher, of course. French citizens still have to pay for their electricity, after all.
France also produces less CO2, sell electricity at reasonable and stable cost.
If fossil fuel weren't massively subsided (impact the environment for free, wars with taxpayer money), Nuclear would have made a massive dent.
Producing the same with other sources will have a massive immediate impact on the land / environment.
I like the idea that fossil fuel should take the hit from the impact on the environment, but don't see why nuclear should at the same time get a free pass for Chernobyl and Fukushima. Surely nuclear needs to take the hit from those as well in order to make the comparison apples-to-apples?
It hasn't made a significant contribution because of panic after the various accidents and the "environmentalists" deciding to advocate against it when it was the clearest path to accomplishing their stated goals.
Energy security is something I expect the government to invest my tax dollars in especially energy generation that is resilient to international politics and reduced carbon emissions.
Then nuclear isn't it.
Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
> Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
It is reasonable to have a many-year strategic reserve of uranium for what you need. A modern reactor is going to go through 20 tonnes of enriched fuel a year and they refuel every 18-24 months. 5-10 years of security and stability is much, much better than oil and gas.
> The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
There isn't enough room in my house for anymore people but there's enough room for a new couch. How can these things both be true? Probably because the two have entirely different requirements and "there isn't room" is shorthand for many, many things.
Not saying they're right, just that this is a bad counter argument, especially since the alternatives all have the same problem.
> Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
Yes, you need water capacity for cooling, about 2x as much as a gas plant for the same output. Definitely a trade-off. I don't know or care enough about Swiss water access to argue here.
> has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country
The uranium-producing countries are Kazakhstan, Canada, and Namibia. There is zero chance that you cannot get one of those to sell to you.
> Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
Wut?
You can make decades stocks of the fissile source
>Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
What on earth are you talking about?
Slight hyperbole, but nuclear reactors in Switzerland and France shut down more and more often because the water needed to cool them down is already too hot:
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-adaptation/beznau-nucle...
It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers.
> It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers.
Note though that those limits exist just like the emission limits for WiFi: it was a sane number when it was decided. It's not clear at all that raising the temperature a little more will "kill all life in the rivers". It would probably deserve some research.
I think it would be more accurate to say "avoid killing the most vulnerable life" crossing the line would not be the end of the world.
Cannot be worse than wasting many billions in F35s, can it?
Are you opposed to F35s only or to army spendings in general?
Not opposed to defence in principle. But Switzerland's army has proven, repeatedly these last few years, that they are incompetent. From understanding a multi-billions contract before signing it to selecting relevant technology (drones that fundamentally cannot fly in a civilian airspace, etc).
Not only incompetent: the way the F35 was handled really looks like corruption from the outside. And for some reason the head of the defence ministry AND the head of the army left not so long after that...
The estimated levelized cost of electricity changes dramatically with financing cost: from roughly the low-$100s/MWh under cheap capital to well above $200/MWh under high capital-cost assumptions. But wasn't that the case for wind and solar too?
For solar I believe it's profitable without subsidies in most parts of the world by now. It's the fastest growing power source by far worldwide and it wouldn't be if it had to be financed by subsidies.
I don't know enough about wind to say either way about that.
But both wind and solar have the benefit of being able to just abandon the plants if they turn out to lose money. Which you of course cannot do with a nuclear plant.
Rancho Seco in the US has had a taxpayer financed security crew for 36 years without producing any electricity. That costs eats away at the profits (if any) generated by the plant when it was operational, but nobody keeps track of that.
The costs are not relevant to the nuclear operator and are not retroactively counted as costs for the electricity, since the government pays.
But they pay with our money. And our children's money. And their children's money.
Well, wind and solar were absolutely subsidy-driven. The difference is that after subsidies, they became cheap and modular, and I hope nuclear becoming modular and cheaper as well.
Rancho Seco.... what an insane story. Didn't know about that. So if your have a bad nuclear project, people are basically stuck with it, unlike replacing solar panels or wind turbines.
Could we try to make companies compete and reduce a bit the amount of corruption ?
Note that it’s similar with eoliens wind turbines, they are heavily subsidized
Is that meaningfully different than modern coal and natural gas plants?
That's what infrastructure is, yes.
Por que no los dos?
Also absolutely minimum of 20 years to build it.
So this is fixing nothing short term.
..as opposed to other green energy programs that received no government investment?
...or the externality-free fossil fuel industry?
Switzerland, Norway and Austria are probably the country that needs nuclear the less, but anything to start the discussion in other European countries is good.
Probably not economically viable in Switzerland though.
Hard disagree. As a. swiss voter, this is close to my heart.
50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission.
Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise.
To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potential losses of hydro power as glaciers melt, nuclear + solar is the only real path for switzerland.
Why hasn't Switzerland deployed solar/wind? That seems like a pretty big miss in general. The Swiss grid has almost no wind which is strange for such a mountainous nation. And solar is also quite low which is also strange given how much empty land exists in Switzerland along with it's relatively low latitude.
Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol:
The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.
People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.
Also wind turbines kill birds and bats, it is an actual problem to be put in the balance.
The balance being: do you build a ton of those turbines, or one nuclear plant?
They do and it's a problem, but it's a minor issue compared to, say, cars or rat poison. Both kill lots of birds, but somehow when it's wind turbines people suddenly care about the birds. See also: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/technology-articles/...
yeah, some it has been shaped by man, but that does not negate or invalidate the fact that they like it the way that it is.
My clean dinner table is completely artificial, but that doesnt mean I should be neutral to someone placing a bowl of shit on it.
See this long-form investigation:
https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587327
nimby
Yeah, that seems like it'd be something that would also stop nuclear deployment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind
Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s
I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.
Where's the solar currently? Is it also victim to NIMBYs? Or shading?
I can understand people objecting to plastering the south facing unshaded Alps with panels, but .. it would certainly generate a lot.
I will probably vote in favor of nuclear, but you have to admit that us not having any uranium and having huge solar and pumped hydro potential up in the alps makes Switzerland pretty bad match for nuclear.
Still much better than gas though…
As you are Swiss, where would you get the uranium from? I expect that the Swiss Alps have some mine, especially in the south west (I didn't check) but is that enough? You might end up swapping a dependency from foreign providers of oil and gas with a dependency from foreign providers of uranium.
to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.
Like I said in another comment: nuclear only makes sense if you build it at scale, because you need very specific skills and knowledge that is hard to get to build it securely, on time and cheap. Ideally you would have one company/conglomerate that would get one plant off the ground per year across the EU, but currently that isn't possible.
I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else, but I guess the economic argument still holds.
>I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor
...You guys have mountains everywhere, which means dirt cheap hydro energy storage for solar and wind?
I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.
I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.
I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.
I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....
I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.
Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale
Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.
We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)
Wind would be particularly effective in Switzerland and it's fast to deploy. The swiss grid has less than 1% wind which was pretty shocking to me. It seems like Switzerland has a particularly bad renewable story for an EU nation.
Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule.
The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).
Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.
> Mine is a net producer for example.
All year? And do you mean you "inject" more than you "pull", or do you mean that you can live without ever pulling anything from the grid?
Because "being a net producer overall" doesn't say that it would work in practice if everyone was doing the same, right?
It's not in the EU. It is part of the Schengen Agreement.
It's not an EU nation.
Oh wow, I didn't realize that! That's crazy, basically everyone that borders them are EU members. I was also under the impression (but haven't checked) that it was pretty easy to cross the swiss border both into and out of the EU.
Switzerland unilaterally got out of negotiations with the EU, which also dealt with energy grid coordination.
As such, as of now, the EU can shut down Switzerland without warning if the grid is overloaded and they need to avoid a blackout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area
> I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.
Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?
Build a solar plant in the Sahara desert and ship the energy long range,
Nuclear's probably still more expensive than that.
I'm not saying we give up on nuclear entirely. It should be at the well-funded research and prototyping phase for another 10 years.
In my opinion, at least for consumer energy, I think perovskite solar cells and sodium ion batteries for home storage will enable a very large oversupply or overcapacity start evening out the intermittent fears.
But admittedly I haven't not done the exact math
I think we (as in Switzerland) are preparing for a future in which there is not much snow melt/precipitations to fuel hydro production year round.
In fact, if the AMOC weakens/stops then there will be a drastic drop in precipitation across Europe and funnily enough maybe the temperature drop so much that the little snow there will be won't melt in big enough quantities.
Of course this is just a ban lift, meaning that there are no concrete plans to build one or more, but if there is a need to move "fast" (nuclear is not, I know) at least there is one less hurdle. I sincerily hope we invest in other technologies, especially now that Sodium batteries seem on their way to solve grid level storage, but I don't necessarily see this as a bad move per se.
It is no coincidence that countries which need it least can unban it. Deindustrialization activists will focus their efforts on countries where the ban matters.
Small land area, mountainous, northerly latitude… it’s not that wind and solar won’t work, but I don’t think you can automatically compare costs to giga-scale solar farms in spacious and sparsely populated equatorial countries. Even if more expensive, nuclear will have a niche, and it’s madness to rule it out.
Yes, it may be more of a symbolic gesture for Switzerland's own needs but it's still good to correct the historical error of prohibiting a broad range of potentially viable approaches from ever being considered.
With little land usable for solar and wind I was thinking that Switzerland and Austria would need it more
Edit: Not Norway - Doh!
Norwegian here.
- We have a lot of hydro, that are very cheap to produces and for some of the power plants we fill up water by using solar and wind when that is very cheap and generate power back when it's demand for it (meaning selling it expensive)
-Norway export more then we are importing. But that could shift in the coming years.
-Nuclear power are expensive, so with the current prices it do not make sense to have nuclear in Norway. Thought that could change (see point 2)
- not sure what you mean by "little land usable", you can absolutely be correct. in terms of size we are bigger then Germany. But I'm not sure how much usable land there is vs other countries. We do not have that big population but it's spread out and no one wants a wind park in their neighborhood
Sorry not sure why I wrote Norway rather than Austria!
Obviously Norway has massive amounts of offshore wind potential too
I think he was referring to hydro with all the mountains it is actually prime real estate for dams.
They can always sell the electricity
It's far too expensive for that with how cheap renewables are making electricity. France is already struggling with that.
Technically yes, but also no. The European electricity market have way, way to many rules and caveat to draw any conclusion, especially France with ARENH and other distortions.
It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.
I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.
Sure wish the UK could get some of this cheap renewable energy you're referencing.
That turns out not to be the case.
France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.
Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.
Like the F-35 fighter jet, this is just another victory for lobbyists in the industry who will be able to siphon public money into over-budget, deadline busting white whale projects that will never recoup its costs.
Especially nuclear. It is now economically non-viable.
Nuclear plants are useful, for one.
> It is now economically non-viable.
Nuclear is about the next 50+ years. The economy will explode long before that. Nuclear plants are a way to produce energy in a world without cheap oil. That changes the economical considerations a lot.
What lobbyists? Concrete powder companies? Other governmental companies?
Keep in mind similar things have been said about solar and wind previously.
Civil engineering, power equipment (ABB is a big firm in Switzerland), Energy companies (the market is Switzerland is a constellation of local monopolies, who have already announced they won't invest their own huge money reserves in nuclear, it will have to be all public money and garanties), etc.
Civil engineering and power equipment companies also profit from other plants. In fact, there are specialized power companies for wind and solar. Can't speak for all countries, but lobbying for green energy in the USA, according to PACs, is higher than nuclear. I don't think Switzerland is different.
If energy companies won't invest, then either don't invest public funding, or invest but with focus on developing long-term technologies. After all, the primary reason for nuclear being uneconomic today is lack of investment. If solar and wind can be made profitable, I don't see how nuclear is any different.
Still, the positive note of this is the ban lift, not whether new reactor will actually be built.
It it turns out like the F-35 it would be amazing. F-35 is much better and safer than what came before and more important CHEAPER per unit than previous generations.
I can't say if this is uninformed or sarcasm?
Lots of people in this thread look at this as a pro/anti-nuclear debate. But few people consider the fact that the first election from the said nuclear plant will be produced 25 years from now in the very best case. Plus, nuclear plants have a huge cooling problem during summertime.
Whether people like it or not, nuclear power is the path forward for the foreseeable future; at least until nuclear fusion becomes a reality. With incoming AI/automation, ya’ll need all the power ya can get.
Yeah what the hell, I want tiny and small nuke-batteries so we can finally get cars and phones that doesn't need charging anymore, would solve a lot of problems and surely won't introduce any new ones.
What you really need is 24/7 power supply, it might become a luxury to have uninterrupted electricity exactly as it is a luxury to have enough of fresh water.
When you're in one place, you'll just have a battery+solar I bet, but for when on the go, maybe for days, having a tiny nuclear battery that lasts N years would be great.
The pro-nuclear propaganda in this discussion reminds me of the tobacco companies that claimed smoking was harmless, or of Monsanto, which insisted that its pesticides were safe, and so on. It is always the same pattern: obvious facts are denied, doubts are exaggerated, legitimate concerns are downplayed, and blatant lies are spread. I wonder how many undercover lobbyists for the nuclear industry are active here on HN.
Probably only few. Nuclear attracts dreamers. But would they pay the price, literally? Cost is the real reason nuclear is dying.
Switzerland seems like a country where they wouldn't have trouble hiring enough very responsible serious people capable of running nuclear plants. Aside from being able to acquire fuel is there any reason they are not near 100% nuclear?
They built their existing nuclear plant in order to hide their nuclear weapons program. So the point really wasn’t energy generation. Nuclear weapons is the main reason countries build nuclear power.
Yes. Environmentalists.
There are people which want the best we can do (eg, no Ng, coal, etc) in electricity generation. Sensible reductions, that sort of thing. Then there are those that just want no electricity to be used at all, ever, period.
They'll complain about hydroelectric(carbon in cement production), about things which can happen with nuclear(accidents), about birds in windmills, about the production methods of making solar panels, and so on. To such people, doing anything is bad for the environment, so therefore, every type of power generation is bad.
To listen to such people is, of course, madness, as is listening to all extremists. We should simply ignore them completely, but of course the news exists, fake protestors exist which are paid, and so on and so forth.
A long-form exploration of energy in Switzerland for those interested:
https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...
Combined with Italy's change of heart, hopefully approved and put into law before July 2026, this is going to mark the revival of nuclear energy in Europe. Here for it
There is no prosperity without stable and cheap energy.
Great news, just hoping the people understand this as well.
end non proliferation rules. its blocking nuclear adoption way more than environmental movements ever did esp in developing countries. and imo its better for a lot of countries to have nuclear weapons than just a few, if they have to exist at all.
This is at best the concept of a vibe shift. Even if they started sprinting now, it would be 20 years before anyone would see the results of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear is so much more expensive than solar and wind that building one is certain to raise electricity prices.
It's why big oil loves it: We need to do nothing now because nuclear is coming "soon"
that's just lifting the ban and is pure virtue signaling. none of the electricity producers in switzerland actually want build nuclear power plants, because they are way too expensive.
Much cheaper to outsource all production and industry to China as Europe is doing.
Keeping the option open seems prudent. The hard part is winter reliability, not summer generation.
They have a pretty small population, but wind will likely be intolerable because it will harm views[0]. Solar requires surface area as well. So that leaves hydro, which they'll have to pump during the summer months to ensure they have coverage for winter, or nuclear. Or fossil fuels, of course. Gas is still probably optimal for them. I suppose that's the nature of things. We all care very much about the climate, but we do care about our views more.
0: I personally like the look of wind turbines but I understand many don't. The appearance is likely why the Trump administration canceled such projects.
While I'm sold on the fact that modern nuclear can be built & administered safely in the face of natural disasters, and is a net good environmentally, I'm worried about corporate cronyism's corrosive effects on safety (a la Fukushima) and future instability in the form of cornered animals (e.g. Putin, Trump) acting erratically by bombing civilian infrastructure.
Best way to provide power to a population over 10 million
And if the world goes to shit again, having a baseline for building an Alpine nuclear deterrent isn't the worst thing to have on soil.
Switzerland has several operating nuclear reactors:
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Switzerland also studied nuclear weapons production until 1988:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_and_weapons_of_mas...
If the Swiss thought it was in the national interest to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and crash-develop a nuclear deterrent, I think that they could achieve nuclear breakout quickly.
Having people skilled in running versus building.
Best way for who?
Nuclear is vastly more expensive per MWh than renewables. It's better than pumping stuff out the ground sure, but that's about it.
And as usual the nuclear brainwashed lobby on HN still think it's 1990 and nuclear is cost effective.
It can't cope with peaks. It has to generate the same power 24/7 to be anywhere near economical at two-three times the cost of solar+storage, so it either needs massive storage or massive overprovision
Lets say you have a peak demand of say 40GW but average demand of 600GWh a day (25GW), or 219TWh a year
Lets also say you have to shut down a plant for a week a year for maintenence
You need to build five, 10GW plants to meet your demand.
They provide 5 * 10GW * 24 hours * 7 days * 51 weeks or 428TWh.
If nuclear is $110 per MWh, that means it's going to cost you $47b a year to generate your power requirement, or $215 per MWh
So you're needing to roll out storage, same as you do for wind and solar, or spend twice as much on overproducing.
I wonder if they’ll stagger their waking hours so that electric power consumption matches the inflexible output of nuclear reactors.
If only there were a supplemental daylight-based power source that precisely matched peak output to waking hours.
Storage is a thing.
If storage is a thing, then solar makes more sense.
RemindMe! -20 year
Tangentially related: the Swiss built a research-focused nuclear reactor in a cavern. It had a meltdown in 1969, and they were able to keep the decontamination/decommissioning efforts to a minimum by just entombing the thing in concrete.
Honestly, so long as the water table isn't too close, that's not a terrible place to put a nuclear reactor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor
One of the little gems the Russians pulled off in the twenty aughts when they were flooding nonprofits in the USA with dirty money was hijacking the green movement to promote fracking. (Because surely ANYTHING is better than those dastardly electrons or whatever the fuck radiation is made of)
Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants, and with advances in breeder technology new plants doesn't nessecarily mean new mining operations, which often are quite harsh on the surrounding area.
“Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants …”
I would have said that about the Japanese as well…
japan actually seems averse to any kind of change in a way they aren't. do swiss atms close at a certain time of day? do many takeout places want you to fax orders? there's a lot of things that go beyond "conservative" in japan in the risk averse sense into just being stuck in the 80s.
fantastic!
...but nobody wants to build it: https://www.bluewin.ch/de/news/schweiz/die-schweiz-kann-wied...
Excellent.
Those energy conglomerates are really desperate for public money aren't they? Sorry guys, solar and wind are cheaper
AI made this inevitable. Every country will follow.
Switzerland is a small country. 3000 square kilometers of the earth is uninhabitable because of nuclear accidents. That would be almost 1/10 of Switzerland. Probably not a good idea.
Swiss will get nukes, denmark will get nukes, sweden will get nukes, finland will get..poland, ukraine, germany, armenia, georgia, armenia, turkey, vietnam, japan, south korea, emirates all gonna get, saudi already got.. [this list is incomplete, you can help to complete this list by doing a empire]. Ironically during the cold war a ton of countries went and became almost nuclear powers. Now thos world is so back baby and the reality denial and loud noises do nothing. Almost as if this plot device never had any connection to anything.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uxLHWVYRg&t=534s