Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.

After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.

Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Western designs are safe, most Soviet-era ones are/were not. It's unfortunate that nuclear power still has this stigma, as it's like saying "all cars are unsafe" while comparing the crash test ratings of a modern sedan to a 1960's chevy bel aire.

I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.

So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.

(E.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nucle... remember when the nuclear industry-promised blackouts finally materialized? I dont).

While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.

This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.

Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.

The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.

However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.

It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.

Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.

Relatedly, you could read what scholars like Langdon Winner say about nuclear energy (in short that they require an almost authoritarian posture in order to safely deal with nuclear fuel and nuclear waste); in contrast with solar which can be deployed at a local and decentralized scale.

https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr...

https://scipython.com/blog/uranium-enrichment-and-the-separa...

The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).

Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.

We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?

I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.

If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.

I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.

Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?

Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control

Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.

I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.

https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...

The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]

[1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees

Regulation yes but I wonder how much of it is just "boomer engineering"

Nuclear efforts should be directed into the safest and simplest designs. Designs that need water pumps to cool (like Fukushima) are the type of unnecessary risk and complexity that nobody needs

Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc

Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction

I understand HN leans moderate to conservative, but we absolutely need regulations in place for nuclear. If done well and safely, nuclear is great. Over and over and over again for-profit companies have proven they are not capable of prioritizing safety if regulations are not in place to stop them.

Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.

What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.

We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.

1. You can operate the facility with a zero critical accident over the whole lifespan of the power plant.

2. You know what to do with a nuclear waste (like keep it safely deeply buried for 10'000 years).

However, point 2) is almost irrelevant now because we already have enough depleted nuclear fuel to deal with it.

Nor is mining for coal!

Interestingly, the 4% actual “waste” is also quite valuable for industrial, scientific and medical purposes too. Radiation treatments for cancer, X-ray machines, etcetera all can use them. This is not mentioning smoke detectors, betavoltaics and the numerous other useful things that can be made out of them. Deep space missions by NASA rely on betavoltaic power sources. Currently, there is a shortage, which has resulted in various missions being cancelled. Our failure to recycle “spent” nuclear fuel rods is a wasted opportunity.

The real problem with nuclear energy is, and always has been the cost. It always seems to turn into a boondoggle.

Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price.

The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.

1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year

1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.

Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.

Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.

Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.

It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.

It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.

But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.

It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"

Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.