It's never an economic decision to build nuclear power stations. They're 5x the cost of solar and wind.
Modeling by the American Farmland Trust (AFT) finds that 83% of projected solar development will be on agricultural land, of which 49% will be on land AFT deems “nationally significant” due to high levels of productivity, versatility, and resiliency. In May 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) reported that between 2009 and 2020, 43% of solar installations were on land previously used for crop production and 21% on land used as pasture or rangeland.
In a few years we'll have to deal with an impending disposal issue on farmland:
Forecasts suggest that 8 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their lifecycles by 2030. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory reports that less than 10% of decommissioned panels are recycled. Many end up in landfills at the end of their lifecycle, which could be problematic, according to researchers with the Electric Power Research Institute because panels could break and leak toxic materials like lead and cadmium into the soil. If decommissioned panels are not disposed of properly, they could contaminate the surface and groundwater in the surrounding area, making disposal a major issue for farmers and rural communities who rely on groundwater for needs ranging from crop irrigation to drinking water.
Depending on how the panels are put in place, the land and soil quality will increase significantly because its reverting to fallow and long rooted stabilising plants will have 25 years to build up the biome again. Converting land back to farming is pretty quick.
I understand the point your making, and I do agree with the end of life cycle issues. THere is going to be a lot of lead leaching into water courses if not dealt with properly.
If you replaced ONLY existing fields used to grow corn for ethanol, and turned those into solar panels, you would already exceed the entire current US demand for electricity.
Solar energy is a phenomenal use of land, of which we have enormous amounts of in this country.
Currently their liability is capped at $300 million. Fukushima cleanup cost $800 billion.
End the insurance free ride first and then maybe lets talk about deregulation.
Eve China, the best nuclear power builders out there, are shifting away from massive nuclear to storage and wind and solar.
Without a major technological innovation in the nuclear power space, I don't see how it can compete, except at the poles and in niches with very poor renewable resources.
Grid storage is cheap enough that Texas, a purely profit-driven grid is now overtaking California in the amount of battery storage deployed. 58GWh of new grid storage was added in 2025 alone, and the growth is still exponentialhttps://seia.org/news/united-states-installs-58-gwh-of-new-e...
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30386-6
Firm low-carbon resources consistently lower decarbonized electricity system costs
• Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases
• Without these resources, electricity costs rise rapidly as CO2 limits near zero
• Batteries and demand flexibility do not substitute for firm low-carbon resources
Non-tropical equatorial countries don't have meaningful seasonality, so they don't need seasonal storage.
For countries far north of the equator, it's more challenging, but there are multiple tools to address this, including: over-building so you have enough in winter, using wind which is seasonally negatively correlated with solar, importing power over HVDC, and diversifying wind spatially to reduce correlations which drop more than linearly in distance.
For small countries very far away from the equator that have highly variable insolation and limited geography to decorrelate, nuclear may be better. But it cannot be asserted a priori without a simulation study tailored to the specifics of that location. When I said that nuclear is bad, I am talking in generalities about the common case (United States) at current market prices.
The paper that you linked is old, we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar.
" we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar."
But not in grid storage. That is still incredibly expensive.
No it doesn't. Why do you just say that? There are simulation studies like CSIRO's work which show that it's still cheaper than nuclear after you account for everything.
The price of grid storage is absolutely falling exponentially with respect to time.
The term vaguely makes sense if there are sources of electricity that output a constant supply that are cheaper than the dispatchable sources of power. Like nuclear was supposed to be (but in the end is not). Or in some very specific locations hydro (without a reservoir) and geothermal are. But as often bandied about as a "type of power that must be filled" it simply doesn't exist. The type of power that must be filled is dispatachable power, everything else is just "well what cheap non-dispatchable sources can we use to avoid using more expensive dispatchable power".
Dispatchable power is the only sort of power that provides 24x7 power with predictable rates. If there's more demand, you produce more power (at the same cost). If there's less, you produce less so you can sell what you do produce at the same cost.
If you use electricity to synthesize gas and then burn that later to generate electricity that is still cheaper than nuclear power.
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Nobody builds nuclear power because it's cost effective or green. They either have nukes like China or have purchased an option on nukes (like Iran or Poland).
For that scenario, nuclear is still marginally cheaper (at today's prices at least).
There is still nowhere in the world nuclear power makes economic sense.
The problem with nuclear today is just that it simply hasn't kept pace with the lowering cost of alternatives.
its really not. The new(ie 90s) french reactors are about as fast as Combined cycle gas turbines. Even if its not, it works well enough, spain has shit all battery capacity and manages well enough
but if you have lots of renewables you need batteries ideally, which means the hypothetical argument of "its too slow" goes away because batteries are there to even out the supply.
It's actually more diverse than I thought.
The same holds for hydro. Even worse, there would be no time for evacuation. Yet nobody is considering banning dams.
Edit to add: Before anyone jumps on for this it's important to note that without the Banquiao disaster the rates are about the same. Still means "nuclear is unsafe" is kind of a red herring.
If Ukraine didn't have nuclear energy they would be blacked out now.
Russia has bombed the switchyards and trandformers of other NPPs though.
(0) https://co2coalition.org/2024/05/21/coals-importance-for-sol...
(0) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we...
Seeing that already here in Canada. All parties (except one) seem united in their newfound aspiration to just mine and ship more of the stuff.
Talking about transition is politically toxic here right now.
I strongly suspect it was primarily created by the US threatening to annex us via "economic force" and thus creating a need to prioritize our short term economic strength over longer term charity things like climate change.
But Canada has a pretty great climate apart from a bit of snow, I wouldn't take warmer at the cost of a small risk of desertification, forest fires, hurricanes, etc. Climate change is unfortunately not just in the nice and warm direction.
Warmer over here in the west means wetter, which means land slides and floods (plus more wild fires in drier seasons). It also means a pivot in tourism (from glaciers, ski resorts, frozen north) to well, who knows what at this stage.
Logging also becomes even less advisable (see land slides etc.).
So less "hey win win" (with an implied wink), more "hey win, lose, lose, ?".
I also think that there's a bigger force at work which is that despite actually being only 2nd or 3rd in Canada's GDP by percentage, energy sector is basically the majority of what's on the TSX and a key driver in equity growth in Canada. And so, the old maxim applies in regards to climate change and Canadians generally: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I'm from Alberta originally and talking to extended family etc about this topic is just painful. Not officially climate change denying, but in practice fully actually
https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...
Ahem, have I missed something? Do you know more then the rest of us? I mean, has the nuclear waste problem actually been solved?
Climate change is a problem for 50 years ago. And now. Very, very much now.
Having to, in the worst case, designate some small areas that we choose as uninhabitable "nuclear waste zones" in a few decades is vastly preferable to having to designate entire regions of the world as uninhabitable "too hot to live" zones around the same time. And that's if we don't find some better way to handle the nuclear waste.
* Not in the sense of "a permanent and comprehensive solution". However, the actual spent nuclear fuel can now be reprocessed and reused in newer reactor designs, down to a tiny fraction of what we would have considered "nuclear waste" with the earliest designs in the mid-20th century.
So if you look at new resources being added to the grid, it's all solar, wind, storage, and a tiny bit of new fossil gas generation.
The biggest impediment to more renewables is no longer cost, it's politics and regulations. We have a president that has torpedoes one of the best new sources of wind, offshore wind, just as it's becoming super economical, and all the rest of the world is going to get the benefit of that cheap energy while the US falls behind. Floating offshore wind in the Pacific, based on the same type of tech as floating oil platforms, could provide a hugely beneficial amount of electricity at night and in winter, to balance out solar with less storage and less overbuilding.
Meanwhile on land, transmission line are a huge bottleneck towards more solar and wind, and the interconnection queue for the grid is backed out to hell in most places.
The technology and economics are there, but the humans and their bureaucracy is not ready to fully jump on board.
its bottlenecked by price. The reason why the UK's electricity is so fucking expensive is because its pegged to international gas prices
I'd totally agree for UK and continental Europe. The difference between oil and gas is massive on the distribution angle, oil moves easily as long as there's not a naval blockade, but fossil gas requires super super expensive infrastructure either via pipeline or LNG. And with nearly all fossil fuel companies in the last stages of their life, trying to maximize profits on existing capital, it's hard to get investor support to buy infrastructure that costs multiple billions and has limited lifetime. I don't know the details in Europe, but it seems like this phasing out of infrastructure as the transition happens is a major hassle... I'd love any links on that sort of info about Europe.
When you say that distribution costs for the UK are much less than in the US, do you mean the cost of distributing natural gas? I'm not following your logic there.
"I wonder how good it could be"
It's already here, solar is already dramatically cheaper and has none of the risk profile a global energy market produces. You install solar and you have that energy for decades.
Solar is here and its cheaper, batteries are good enough for utility scale. Now its simply an adoption curve.
Moralizing or bringing up silly arguments about how cost ought to be accounted should be considered harmful to the progress away from fossil fuels. Unless it's your intent to start pointless arguments.
But I do think I get your point - the subsidies are there so we should compare the costs as they are.
It’s quite intriguing that we haven’t been able to come up with solid energy policies in the recent decades and it’s all about rent seeking behavior of existing providers that’s holding us back. I don’t understand why we can enable things like Uber/Lyft to disrupt the taxi madalyon system, but become very protective about certain industries, even when it’s in our best interest to explore those areas in detail (regardless of the result).
Article states 93% of new generation capacity was renewable which is good, but I can sense that nimbyism is growing towards wind and solar. Not to mention the animus towards China who has wisely cornered manufacturing of these.
The US has shot itself in the foot because of its energy dependence on its own energy source. The resource curse strikes again.
That isn't how that works. Domestic students are just as cheap.
I'm not sure this is such a big issue. If the research environment is poor in their home country, the VC environment is probably even worse. Also consider every foreign professor teaching in the US right now is essentially a modern Operation Paperclip victory against their homeland. And there are a lot of them. Plus the student is still contributing to American research efforts as a grad student here. It isn't all unilateral effort unilateral benefit. They are advancing their PIs grant effort. They are probably teaching and mentoring.
I think you're giving the US Universities far too much credence, and the US myopic political situation far too little scrutiny.
The market will incentivize actors to smooth out before those kinds of restrictions are necessary.
People might not like changing their habits to follow the energy, but they'll probably be pretty happy when the end result is both good for the environment and cheaper overall. At least in my corner of the Midwest, either the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and often both.
The way a traditional grid works is that you have baseload plants (nuclear, coal) that generate all the time and peaker plants (hydro, natural gas) that make up the difference between the baseload generation and the current demand by varying the amount they generate to match demand in real time.
The higher demand periods when you're not using electricity to heat buildings are typically daytime and early evening. Solar generates power during daytime. That makes "use solar instead of natural gas during daytime" an easy win. You can also do things like "charge electric vehicles mostly during daytime" and use solar again. Then you're still using natural gas in the early evening but you save a lot of fuel (and CO2) by not having to use them during the day. Meanwhile the gas plants are still there to use in the evening and then you can use them on a day when it's cloudy.
That's still where we are in most places. There isn't enough solar in the grid yet to completely replace natural gas during most of the solar generation window, and we could add even more by electrifying transportation, so we can still add a lot more solar before we have to really deal with intermittency at all.
Optimists would then like to extrapolate the economics of doing that to doing 100% of generation from renewables, which would require actually dealing with it.
Given this is the top comment on the article at the moment, I thought it was worth at least pushing back on this sentiment at least a little bit.
[0]https://us.qcells.com/blog/qcells-north-america-completes-da...
[1] https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-produ...
Total U.S. energy use: about 27.6 million GWh/yr
From renewables: about 2.5 million GWh/yr
Renewables’ share of total energy: about 9%
This includes the total energy usage, including cars and buses and propane for heating homes and like just about everything else. This is the number we need to maximize.
But, the other practical effect is that if you use less fossil fuels you're making the climate worse more slowly. Now, given we'd like it to stop getting worse just making it worse more slowly isn't the whole answer but it does at least help.
Ericson2314•3h ago
> Nine coal power plants that were set for retirement last year have had their operating lives extended, including five in response to emergency orders from the Department of Energy.
Maybe the other 4 still stay open without the bullshit DoE order keeping the 5 open, but who knows.
wat10000•3h ago
cucumber3732842•3h ago
tialaramex•1h ago
On the other hand for House reps the elections are every two years like clockwork, "after they win election" is in effect never because they will already be thinking about re-election, so if that's what they're asking for they mean never.
pstuart•3h ago
Apparently they are failing to attain traction because despite the promise of lower cost reactors due to them no longer being bespoke, their LCOE cannot compete with renewables.
I'd argue that we should subsidize those and help make them happen NOW even if the cost is not as low as it should be, as we need all the energy we can get and we need to get off of fossil fuels NOW to try to mitigate global warming.
dummydummy1234•3h ago
lukeschlather•2h ago
nradov•3h ago
They might be a good option for remote sites off the grid where physical security isn't a concern.
lithos•2h ago
Tell someone over 60 or 70 that Poland has better modular reactors than us, and they'll suddenly care.
credit_guy•2h ago