Anyways, solar is also cheaper
The lithium battery plant in northern Sweden went bankrupt so its difficult to say how to solve the storage solution by both being cheap and financial viable. New battery solutions are being made, but in the end it need to be cheap enough over the long term. The current use of gas for non-optimal weather means prices jump up by a factor of around 100x of what it is during good weather, and the average price in nordpool (the northen pan-European power exchange) is about 20x than what you get with good weather. That should illustrate how much variability there is in the energy price right now, and how much people are paying for that gas powered electricity in periods of non-optimal weather conditions.
A lot of fossil fuel subsidies goes directly to support the high variability power grid, and they more than doubled during 2022 when the gas prices went up. It is incredibly expensive, likely more than nuclear, to have a grid supported by renewables during optimal weather conditions and fossil fuels during non-optimal weather conditions. It also generate a lot of waste in term of pollution which has a bigger issue both short and long term than nuclear waste.
This is pretty far from the truth. Exactly One Swimming Pool is all that is needed to store the entire "waste" for a country.
If you don't recycle it.
Or if you don't put it concrete.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
In recent news we are seeing the fossil lobby ally with new built nuclear power since wasting money and opportunity cost on new built nuclear power potentially may stymie renewable development.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-12-09/nuclear-e...
Look, I love nuclear technology. But time has moved on. The costs to rebuild this industry is astronomical and means we lose out on key-future technology like batteries.
Edit: But then there are bombs. And especially French love their nukes due national security. This is the only reason to keep pushing for nuclear, since Russia, the US and China are not gonna change direction on this either. But the very least we could do is be honest about it.
Edit 2: Changed from "World has moved on" to "time has moved on", since evidently China has invested for a good 2 decades to build their own fully functional nuclear-industry. Proving my point that it takes dedicated investment, network effects and scale to rebuild this industry. After all, they too want to mass produce nukes.
Come again?
We are below $1B/GW for solar. China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year.
Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years
It's going great!!!11
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
Thanks for cherry picking and not linking averages.
The energy mix in Germany leads to a situation where electric cars are dirtier than diesel (for the first ~200000 km / 125000 miles driven).
Renewable share of electricity production is about 56% so this claim is not at all credible.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-covers-nearly-5...
Also, Germany currently has the problem of much more and more reliable wind generation in the north, but not enough network capacity to send it all south when needed. It is being addressed, but as expected, it is very complicated because infrastructure across the whole country touches the interests of a lot of groups with very different interests.
We might need much better tunnel building equipment and a deep sub-terranean network... (useful sci-fi idea, needs to be able to cope with mild earth quakes in some regions).
And you are incorrect: renewables are not competitive without heavy subsidies and preferential treatment, such as being allowed to shift the cost of their intermittency onto the reliable producers.
And since nuclear power plants last about 4x longer than renewables, you actually have to install 4x the production to have an equivalent fleet over time.
So by your numbers, the world is shifting towards a nuclear fleet.
The increase in renewable production needs to be 4x greater initially, because of the longer life of nuclear plants. Queueing theory/Little's Law. So this is entirely expected if you are targeting (a) a fairly constant fleet and (b) fairly constant production rate, both of which are desirable.
Under the Messmer plan, France ignored this and built 50+ reactors in 15 years. Which means that they were pretty much done after 15 years, their nuclear industry had basically nothing to do for the next 40 or so years and withered. Bad idea.
The current rate of new construction starts in China implies a build rate of at least 10 reactors per year. With an expected life of 80 years, that implies a target fleet size of around 800 reactors if the rate remains constant.
Consider a city like Mumbai that needs about 3.8 GW per day. One would need lots of windmills and large solar farms that would need to be positioned in a different state having more sunlight throughout the year. Mumbai often experiences cloudy weather and intermittent wind. I cannot imagine only wind and solar supporting the needs of Mumbai.
There are countries other than the US who do not take 20 years to build a reactor. Out-dated regulations, punitive paperwork, and perhaps poor project management are the reasons for the oft-cited delays in the US. Other countries complete their builds in 6 to 7 years. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
First, it was a FOAK design. Which always takes longer to build, it is a prototype.
Second, the nuclear build know how in the nuclear engineers, construction workers, and supply chain was not really there any longer.
Third, they used a new permitting system, which in theory should have been better and probably will be better in the future: instead of ongoing individual checks and modifications, which made every nuclear power plant in the US a unique unicorn, you are now allowed to submit a master design and once approved you can build that over and over. Without changes.
Alas, Westinghouse wasn't actually done with the design when they submitted. So when they started building, they noticed that they had submitted plans that could not actually be built. Oops. That cause massive delays. And delays = cost.
And the suppliers fought each other, one went bankrupt etc. COVID also didn't help.
So how can we guarantee that the same won't happen in the future and that NOAK builds will be better? Well, for one they now have plans that are obviously buildable, because a bunch of AP-1000s have been built. So that exact thing absolutely can't happen.
Also, we can look to China. Turns out, China also built 2 FOAK AP-1000s. These also took about 10 years, despite China usually building in 5. And it turns out, China built some more AP-1000s after that. NOAK builds. And these took 5 years to build with buildable plans, experience building that reactors and a mature nuclear industry to back them.
So there is good reason to believe that future NOAK builds of the AP-1000 and of comparable reactors will be much faster and much cheaper than what we've seen so far.
You can buy a floating nuclear power plant in the form of an aircraft carrier for a lot less than $16B. The US Navy builds these things as a matter of course in a few years using standard designs they crank out by the dozens.
And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is)
Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
Surprisingly it seems worthwhile to build solar in places like the UK/Netherlands/Denmark since solar production is negatively correlated with wind.
Norway and Sweden have large hydropower resources too.
And of course the capacity factor for PV is about 10%, so you need 10x the capacity to get the same output even on average. Never mind that you get nothing at night, and very little in winter.
Contrary to capitalist believe you cannot solve all issues fast by throwing unreasonable amounts of money at it. You must built industries that synergies with each other, have deep institutional knowledge and capable workers that can deliver the tiny tolerances required to make nuclear safe and effective.
We simply do not have the (intellectual) capacity for this anymore and the effort is better spent on battery technology if Europe actually wants to have any stake in future of EV and renewables. It is significantly less capital intense too.
We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator.
Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part.
All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive.
Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.
The Finnish EPR only took 18 years of construction. What a marvel of engineering and planning.
There is a massive nuclear renaissance in-progress.
According to the following tracker:
https://globalenergymonitor.github.io/maps/trackers/nuclear/
There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively.
Note that both the numbers are pretty large compared to the installed base (more than doubling the installed base), that they are increasing for the earlier stages (indicating more is in the pipeline than is currently being built), and that all the pipeline stages are increasing over time.
Which is of course consistent with the fact that 34 countries have now signed the international pledge to triple nuclear output that was first agreed at COP28. These countries include: France, the United States, China, Japan, Poland, Sweden, etc. India has plans and is on track to triple by 2032, but hasn't signed the pledge.
I am also not sure why you think that "all existing experts" have retired and there is no nuclear industry. The World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris November 4-6 of this year had over 1000 exhibitors, and more than half of those were from Europe.
https://www.framatome.com/en/evenements-clients/world-nuclea...
Even phase-out-Germany still has substantial nuclear engineering capacity, there's even a nuclear fuel factory in Lingen. And of course the actual nuclear component of a nuclear power plant is only around 20%. About the same effort/cost goes into the steam turbines, of which Siemens is a major worldwide supplier.
And of course civil nuclear programs have next to nothing to do with military nuclear programs. There are many more users of civil nuclear power than there are military nuclear powers, and the military nuclear powers invariably got the bomb first, and added a civil program later, with some like Israel only having a military nuclear program, not a civilian one.
In fact, there's a fun anecdote from the beginnings of the French nuclear program, since you mention France: when the Messmer plan got started, the military wanted to deploy an indigenous type of reactor for the civilian program that was more suitable for military uses, but in the end the government decided to standardize on a US Westinghouse pressurized water reactors that was not useful for military purposes.
This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?
1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
Three more were built in EU since 2000: one in Finland (Swedish/Finnish design) and two in Slovakia (Soviet/Russian design).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Its also already operating the 57 french reactors as well as operating reactors in South Africa, China, Korea, Belgium, Finland.
Sure, the industry will need to grow, but claiming it basically has to start from 0 is ludicrous.
Europe has never stopped working on creating new and better nuclear reactor designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
We haven't built a reactor in a long time. So those EPRs being built are all way behind schedule and thus costing substantially more.
You can design whatever you want. Building one is a whole different story. That's not an opinion that's just what happened at the first 2 EPRs and Hinckley point isn't going great either
France finished Flamanville 3 in 2024. Finland finished Olkiluoto 3 in 2022. Are those not recent enough? both were EPR designs
Yes there are new ones but both of those are perfect examples of the lack of knowledge [1].
I'll quote: > Many of the organisations chosen to work on the different parts of the plant did not have any experience in nuclear, and little understanding of the safety requirements.
We'll get there. But yes, we're rebuilding a lot of lost knowledge and paying for the teething issues.
1: https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-nuclear-finlands-cautionary-...
Olkiluoto 3 started regular production in 2023, taking 18 years to build at a cost of €11 billion (3x over budget).
Flamanville 3 started regular production in 2024, taking 17 years to build at a cost of €13.2 billion (4x over budget) or €19.1 billion including financing in 2015 prices.
Hinkley Point C (two reactors) is currently estimated to have its first unit come online around 2030, taking 14 years with total costs now estimated at £31-35 billion / €36–41 billion (2x over budget) in 2015 prices.
The UK is so disappointed by their HPC project (which is the most expensive nuclear reactor project in history, AFAIK), that they just completed the investment decision for the follow-up Sizewell-C, which will also be 2 UK-EPRs.
Oh, the guarantee price for HPC is the same as that for various off-shore wind-projects. So obviously economically uncompetitive. At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion. Which does put the cost of £41 billion into perspective, despite that being the most ridiculously over-time and over budget nuclear project in history.
Actually, Flamanville 3 did not start "regular" production in 2024, they were just given go-ahead to go to full power a few days ago. It was first grid-connected in 2024 and then started a lengthy ramp-up phase. It slowly coming online was the time for the Cour des Comptes to give its verdict, which was pretty damning.
Flamanville 3 was probably the worst run nuclear project in French history. And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
EDF is often accused of receiving heavy state subsides, with the implication that this is to keep the nuclear power plants going or subsidize nuclear electricity. It is true that EDF gets state subsidies. For their intermittent renewable projects. Ba-da-dum-tss. The nuclear party of their business is tremendously profitable, despite being forced to subsidize industry through the ARENH program.
> The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.
The only reasonable conclusion from your logic is that it would have felt like an even worse idea to build nuclear reactors in the 1970's. Yet, using today's hindsight, it was a great idea.
Airbus would have been a terrible idea: no one had built commercial airliners before, and only the US had the know-how. Today, we know otherwise.
etc.
If the competition was renewables and storage rather than plants running on imported oil during the oil crisis it would have been.
75% of all new capacity in TWh (I.e. adjusting for capacity factor.) globally are renewables and storage. There’s no need to swim against the river.
34 nations have committed to tripling nuclear capacity, including the US, China, France, the UK and many others. And they are acting on this as well.
The tide is nuclear, no need to swim against it.
And no, countries also doing renewables in no way negates this.
France built majority of their nuclear reactors after 70s oil crisis. So it made sense to have independent resources for them. So they won't need to rely on other nations, some of which were their former colonies that hated them. They had two strong reasons to keep a nuclear base electricity generations.
That's just plain false, Airbus started as a cooperation between a lot of european aerospace companies, which had different a lot of know-how in different fields. For example Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale, now Airbus) was the French part of the Concorde, they also had the Caravelle.
England also made what I consider to be the prettiest bomber ever made - the Handley-Page Victor
Is this satire?
> If you are so smug about this, answer me:
But I'll answer what I can, assuming your are genuine.
> 1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
I think this is a more American-centric comment than you realized... France had a bigger rollout in the 80's and a few from the 90's so there's another decade (*making this time key!*) before a slow decline. Also remember that France is a lot smaller than America so needs less power.
Not to mention, France exports a lot of electricity[0]. I want you to look pretty closely at that graph again. It says they exported 81.8TW this year. What's France's nuclear capacity? 380TW[1]. France exports about 15% of its total energy, more than all its hydro (it's next biggest source). You may be interested to see where that electricity goes....[2]
France can lose those reactors and be fine, Europe is a different story...
> 2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
> 3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
> the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist
Besides, I'm not sure this fear even makes sense. What, China could "start from scratch" but "France" (or anywhere else) couldn't? What would make China so unique that such things couldn't be replicated elsewhere? This is a fallacy in logic making the assumption that once skills atrophy that they can never be restored or restore more slowly. If anything we tend to see skills restore far quicker from atrophy than from scratch! So why paint a picture of "give up"? Isn't that just making a self-fulfilling prophecy?
[0] https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/exchanges/import...
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
They also rely on imports of uranium - e.g. from Niger, which recently had quite the fallout with France.
It does not look to me at even a casual glance that French nuclear tech could fully work on its own. Similar for the UK.
It is not just about the experts, the supply chain too. Although, of course how much that matters in comparison is the question, since pretty much everything nowadays depends on some faraway place.
China's got 27 reactors under construction right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology that they now have the industry which Europe once had. And to rebuild the same type of industry would take the same amount of effort that China had to do. Meanwhile, the US can't even build their own warships anymore.
In 2024 alone, it added 360GW of wind and solar and the trajectory for renewables is steepening, not declining so this year's number looks like it will exceed this number - 450GW or more.
Capacity factors are just noise when you're dealing with nearly 2 orders of magnitude of difference in scale. Apply whatever adjustment for capacity factor differences that you like but 100GW of nuclear over 15 years is not going to catch up with 450GW of wind and solar per year.
> In the 12 months to June 2025, wind and solar (2,073 TWh) generated more electricity than all other clean sources (nuclear, hydro and bioenergy) combined (1,936 TWh). Just four years ago, wind and solar generated half as much electricity as other clean sources combined.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...
At saturation, given current nuclear build out based on actual construction starts and China’s grid size, China will end up with 2-3% nuclear power in the grid mix.
Enough to sustain a civilian industry to complement any military ambitions, but it does not move the needle.
In terms of electricity China is all in on renewables and storage with a backstop of locally sourced firming coal.
Not "has". "Had". The whole world held their breath after Fukushima.
Now that everybody knows that nothing really consequential happened apart from state overreaction, Japan, China and the rest of the world are no longer holding their breath.
China has been approving 10 or more nuclear power plants per year the last couple of years. Given the lifetime of 80 years of modern nuclear reactors and Little's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law) that implies an expected fleet size of 800 reactors. At 1.2 - 1.4GW per reactors, that would be slightly above 1 TW of generating capacity, which is enough for 90% of current Chinese electricity production.
You could say most of the same things about batteries. There is a little lithium in Europe. But Europe doesn't have a battery industry. It's in China. And you could buy batteries from China, but we aren't doing that and the political trends don't support more energy dependence on China. You could also buy nuclear reactors from China, but of course Europe doesn't want to do that either.
What they are proposing is that Europe is going to pivot from not making batteries to not building nuclear plants. They will, however, write lots of papers about the reactors (neé batteries) they would like to build, if only the prevailing wage or regulatory regime or other economic excuse du jour wasn't stopping them.
It has increasingly become my impression after watching these debates unfold that the core technology is not the real problem. The problem is a lack of political will to encourage the growth of new industries in green energy, failing both at regulatory and industrial policy. Solar is succeeding, not because it is the best form of energy (though it is) but because it is mostly paid for and installed by individuals and small businesses (with a little capital you can own your own solar farm!).
When you look at the data though, its political fallout was much worse than the actual toll on human life, etc. Fukushima released a small about of radiation into the environment. But modern reactors don’t have the same runaway reactivity flaws that Chernobyl did.
Not zero risk. But not the level of risk resulting in half a continent potentially being uninhabitable.
And as for how realistic it was that it would make large areas unlivable, the threat was of a melt-down going far enough down to hit the water table and contaminating the groundwater. That would make large areas only livable if you brought your own water, even for bathing, basically making the area impracticable. Obviously it didn't happen, but I'm not clear whether it was a 0.5% chance, a 5% chance or a 50% chance.
Such an extreme set of outlier events could happen again, of course, but it's not very realistic.
We pay less in practice than the rates given above for power, because the government also subsidizes it. But even without that I understand such rates would be relatively cheap in most European countries.
Provincial regulatory report from 2025-2026:
* https://oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20251017...
Search for "RPP Price Report" for previous ones:
* https://www.oeb.ca/consultations-and-projects/policy-initiat...
Bulk prices at exchanges are way lower, like 2.2¢ per kWh: https://www.ieso.ca/Power-Data/Price-Overview/Ontario-Market...
For a real example, I'm on flat rate and if I use 1000 kWh my monthly bill will be 211 CAD (effective rate 0.21 CAD / 0.13 EUR per kWh) including taxes, connection, delivery, everything, but without subsidy. The amount I pay after the subsidy is applied would be less at 165 CAD.
Would be very curious about the rationale for it if not. Why would you subsidize increased energy use
The reason for the high kW/h is because limited wind/solar during that month and high gas prices which result in high market price at the power exchange. The given reason for the fixed fees is because of the need to expand transmissions and build out more reserve energy to handle the increase variability of the grid as a result of the increase use of renewables and the outcome of decommissioning a few nuclear reactors in the south of Sweden.
The problem is that new built western nuclear power requires ~18 cents/kWh (Vogtle, FV3, HPC etc.) when running at 100% 24/7 all year around, excluding backup, transmission costs and taxes.
Now try sell that electricity to a home owner with solar PV and maybe a battery and you will get laughed out of the room.
This does not even take into account that new built nuclear power requires ~15-20 years from political decision to working plants.
As soon as new built nuclear power’s costs and timelines are confronted with reality it just does not work out.
Anyway, even if that were correct numbers, it would misleading on several fronts, as the only new western reactors were unrepresentative FOAK builds, and also troubled beyond just regular FOAK status.
Furthermore, the costs tend to be calculated for the period while they are repaying the loans, so it's mostly capital costs. Once the plant is paid off, the price drops dramatically.
The average build time is currently 6.5 years, median slightly less, trend downwards.
That is with the first reactor coming online 2038 with a perfectly executed project.
I suggest you stop referencing unsourced statistics when the topic at hand is new built european nuclear power.
Edit - toned it down
Was this really necessary?
In EU, the split between flats (apartments) and houses is roughly 50/50, depending on how densely populated the country is. In the US, it about 1/3 in apartments. Canada is roughly 50/50, with a slight detached-house bias.
Not that it doesn't mean houseowner vs renter. Landlords have next to zero incentive to install solar PV because renters pay for electricity. In the US about 7% of homes have solar, I don't know about EU and Canada.
Solar can't provide baseline and even in sunny SoCal, you will go back to the grid often enough that being off-the-grid isn't reasonable for the typical household.
Anyway, we still need new nuclear power plants.
Where is the fossile fuel being burnt?
There is obviously major ethical issues here. The rich, already developed world- having emitted enormous quantities of CO2 to get there- telling poor, undeveloped people living as subsistence farmers that they can't use any more energy because of all the CO2 already in the atmosphere is a really hard argument to make, locking them into being poor forever while the developed world benefits from all that CO2 consumption. But on the other hand, by skipping right to large scale solar, maybe those inside the circle can do a better job?
China 50%, India 11%. And that is based on their official numbers so probably a lot more.
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
If you take as axioms:
1) Countries have major political interest in whether other countries have nuclear reactors
2) Countries are already, at large scale, manipulating discourse across the internet to achieve their political goals
Then of course it follows that any comment thread on a semi-popular or higher site about whether a country should build more nuclear reactors is going to be heavily manipulated by said countries. That's where (most) of the insane people in such threads are probably coming from.
How are we supposed to survive as a civilization with such corrupted channels of communication?
Why does it matter to energy security? Nuclear power plants contribute to electricity security in multiple ways by keeping power grids stable and complementing decarbonisation strategies since, to a certain extent, they can adjust their output to accompany shifts in demand and supply. As the share of variable renewables like wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) rises, the need for such services will increase.
What are the challenges? Nuclear power faces a contrasted future despite its ability to produce emissions-free power. With large up-front costs, long lead times and an often-poor record of on-time delivery, nuclear power projects have trouble in some jurisdictions competing against faster-to-install alternatives, such as natural gas or modern renewables. It also faces public opposition in many countries. Its uncertain future could result in billions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/electricity/nuclear-power
Do note: There are countries other than the US and France who license nuclear technologies and build-outs. There are innovative technologies by US companies that work with modern regulations and are faster and less expensive to build. We must stop citing US nuclear build times that are largely due to outdated regulations and hostile review processes.
Here are some sources of information that helped me understand the two oft-cited nuclear disasters better.
The World Nuclear Energy write up on the Fukushima incident: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
Some information on the Chernobyl incident: The infographics show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uJhjqBz5Tk
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
A lecture in the MIT Courseware on the incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijst4g5KFN0
This lecture is way more informative where the professor explains how the workers took the system beyond the rated capacity as part of a test.
There have been many lessons learned, and the World Nuclear article linked above shares some of these.
Here is a writeup of the Three Mile Island incident: https://world-nuclear.org/Information-Library/Safety-and-Sec...
One regular complaint is the costs of nuclear energy. This is likely true in the US due to regulations that have not been revised for newer technology, but such high costs are cited around the world.
Likewise, the amount of waste and the danger of the waste is not well understood either, and certainly lots of education is needed here. For e.g., most people do not know that the volume of waste is limited and that the same waste can be reused in reactors of other designs.
I do believe that national ego issues get in the way of fixes. I believe that such ego issues got in the way of honest repairs (Fukushima) and timely action (Chernobyl). Certainly, nuclear inspections are still treated with suspicion and hostility, but in fact full transparency and integrity should be the norm.
Corruption and profit-centric thinking are two other problems that plague the nuclear industry. South Korea has had lots of corruption and shortcuts (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...). One of the accusations in India against France was that France licenses outdated nuclear reactor technology despite having newer technology. I am unable to locate a link supporting this accusation.
With thorium reactors and Small Module Reactors, there are many modern solutions to safety.
ThorCon's Thorium Converter Reactor - Lars Jorgensen in Bali https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1IrzDDI9g
Here is the full training by Thorcon on their reactors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkvEXm-rMW4&list=PLuGiwaUJYE...
We need to stop citing and quoting US-based costs and problems that are linked to outdated US regulations. There are other countries that have more modern regulations and modern technologies.
I suspect the UK will only build the nuclear capacity required to keep the industry around on national security grounds.
klipklop•3h ago
esafak•2h ago