Cadillac Desert is a great history of American dam building and the Bureau of Reclamation

The water requirements of nuclear power stations cooling systems can cause significant issues. The discharge of heated water back into rivers and the sea is also a major problem.

So, hell no, nuclear is not competitive with mega-dams. It's not even competitive with small dams.

> China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...

Here's how much it cost to build nuclear in France during its golden age: https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs. Adjust for inflation and draw your own conclusion.

China's nuclear costs are more opaque, but are estimated at $3B per GW. Again, not competitive.

To solve the variable production from solar and wind, most nations should probably have a safety valve in the form of synthesized fuels. Meaning that during summer when energy is abundant and has to be dumped at negative prices, we use the surplus to synthesize fuels instead.

Synthesizing fuel is inefficient, but since you use surplus energy that doesn't matter.

These are options that are viable right now, but there are also promising developments in batteries that could make them viable for season storage too.

Is this a serious question or "raising concerns".

A quick search brings up wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Finland

and hydro: https://www.andritz.com/hydro-en/hydronews/hn-europe/finland

And connections with friendly neighbours: https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/cef-energy-finla...

I'm sure that there is a role for Nuclear or gas to cover the last few % that renewables find hard to reach. For now.

Japan hasn't built a new nuclear plant in 20 years.

Not as unfair as disregarding my points entirely just because I used the latest reactor built in europe as an example. ;-)

We can use Hinkley point C instead?

When Hinkley point C is completed, estimated 2029 at the earliest, it will have taken 12 years and will produce as much electricity per year as the solar panels installed in Germany last year. And those panels are already producing, now.

Hinkley point C is estimated to cost 44 bn euros by 2029, and it will still cost money after that of course, for maintenance and operations.

If that money had been spent on battery storage for solar instead, the UK might have gotten way more energy at a way lower cost per GWh, and they would have had it _already now_.

When they are in place, battery banks and solar panels have a basically negligible maintenance cost compared to a nuclear plant. Its an investment where you pay upfront and get benefits down the line.

I don't see how nations that wait 10 years for 2-3 GW of nuclear will be competitive in any energy-consuming endeavor against countries that add 40-50GW of solar every year.

* https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

* https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

I don't think that's correct. The infrastructure investment is clearly much much smaller for solar, in practice. IEA and other organizations have observed that solar is the cheapest source of electricity that humankind has ever developed, and this was already a few years ago, when it was more expensive than now.

Consider that several countries are adding the equivalent of several nuclear plants of energy generation yearly by now. Germany, Japan, Canada to name a few. Adding the same capacity with nuclear would be a budget-defining decision for years.

Solar is just so much cheaper and faster to make that nuclear becomes "too little too late" by comparison.

If any nation could decide to make 100s of nuclear plants to match the output from solar it's China, but it just doesn't make sense. It makes way more sense to invest in energy storage to stabilize the massive amounts of energy from solar. China does that too.

Nations that have nuclear weapons will of course keep nuclear plants around anyway, but it is really really hard to make a case for nuclear just for energy supply in 2025.

Batteries especially are just absurd - they're ~10% lithium (and it's mostly in the electrolyte, which realistically means the electrolyte is 100% electrolyte, excuse the tautology), whereas 'lithium ore' is mostly 1-3% (there's some higher, even as high as 8%, but it's mostly 1-3% IIRC). With sufficient scale, that stuff will disappear like scrap copper left on the curb for an hour.

Solar panel waste does not require army supervision to prevent it being used for terrorist acts. The US army has personell permanently stationed at plants that have been closed for several decades by now. They keep costing money for decades after they stopped producing any power.

As of 2025 there isn't a single nuclear site that has ever been in operation that has stopped costing money for the population of the country it is in, simply because of the waste. And there is no end in sight.

As for land, solar panels are usually deployed on land that can still be used for other things. (Rooftops of homes and office buildings, grazing grounds for sheep and farmland for crops that need shade).

The last point is of course why many countries have been able to deploy solar that matches the output of their nuclear generation in just a few years. You have hundreds of thousands of carpenters and electricians that can work simultaneously on building solar panel installations and they get approved by homeowners without any bureaucracy.

Looking at China, the US, the EU, Japan and even a nuclear pioneer like Canada, you see that Solar adds the equivalent of several new nuclear power plants per year, and the power is available immediately.

The only argument with merit is that nuclear works at night and during winter - but so do many other things, much cheaper things, things that don't take a decade+ to build and don't require eternal expensive vigilance.

I can only speculate, but I suppose two major reasons could be that Europe had several companies that could and did build reactors back then, and that o1 and o2 were much smaller than o3.

O1 and o2 were also built before we knew about things like Chernobyl and 9/11 of course.

It's not policy it's physical logistics. Just building the roads to the site where you want the nuclear plant takes months and it's hard to transport anything else to the site before you have those.

You also need to sign thousands of workers who need to be physically on location, meaning you need housing, parking, plumbing, salary administrators, doctors, catering, janitors etc.

Solar is entirely trivial by comparison. Any small town has enough carpenters and electricians to assemble megawatts of capacity in weeks. Which is why it grows so much faster than anything else.

It took 20 years of standardisation and effort to raise lead acid batteries to 99%, and they're as simple as batteries get. Large scale recycle of litium batteries (including the cobalt and nickel) requires changes in how batteries are made to be (either or both) less energy dense and more expensive.

Pumped hydro is the best bet for gridscale. And i'm hoping sodium batteries roll out for EVs within the near future.

That said, sand batteries are amazing for the heat users who can use them - just plug em into some off-grid solar/wind (and/or on-grid, and make money by buying electricity when the prices go negative) and you get 24/7 heat for the price of intermittent renewables.