No civil nuke plant has ever been operated, anywhere in the world, without massive government subsidies, or by coercing ratepayers to pay well above market rates.

Looks like the Swedish public will be on the hook for subsidies for decades more while the rest of Europe (France and Romania perhaps excepted) coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.

Source? Everything I can find counts PPAs which is… kind of a stretch.

PPAs at inflated prices are absolutely subsidies. They impose inflated costs on users of the power, which is only marginally better than on the body politic at large. Or marginally worse, maybe.

Much of the subsidies are the public picking up the tab for disaster insurance the operator is protected against needing to pay for. Of course no actual insurance company could afford to underwrite such a policy.

> coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.

I hope they can coast through the winter using those renewables.

Show me one place anywhere in the entire history of grid-scale renewables where the consumer's costs went down.

The cost to the developer of deploying new solar / wind to a grid may become more favourable, but they're selling in to a market that reselles to retail / commercial clients, who will, inevitably, pay more over time.

I think what you're argument should be is that new nuclear would result in end-users paying more than they would for new renewables.

I'm mostly convinced where you, or anyone else, lands on the matter, is heavily biased by preconceptions...

and generally tend to think we have the resources to do a many-pronged approach, and that success is less technology dependant and more dependant on the competence of governments and bureaucracies, and the people who constitute them.

I frequently get flyers in the mail, from a variety of mostly co-op providers, offering to supply me power more cheaply than the grid operator does.

So in fact my cost, as a consumer, is lower than it was.

You clearly wish this were not so.

EU has a yearly public report on energy subsidies that demonstrate factually where subsidies goes, how much, and for what purpose. Nuclear subsidies are a proportional small part of the subsidies, and the public get more energy per $subsidies in nuclear than from other energy sources. Some key findings from 2021 report:

"Subsidies to nuclear had varied between €3.2bn and € 4bn between 2008 and 2019 but surged to (€6.3bn) in 2020 due to payments for early closures of nuclear power plants."

"In line with anticipations in the Commission Study, the financial aid to renewables in the EU27 is increasing at a low pace since 2015 to reach €78bn in 2019. Our preliminary estimations show a slight reduction in 2020 to around €77bn. Among the 14 identified subsidy instruments, the feed-in-tariff and feed-in premium schemes remain by far the MS preferred tools to promote RES technologies. They represented 79% of the total RES subsidies, i.e. €61bn in 2019"*

These accounting of subsidies almost always omit the bulk as not accounted in euros. The disaster liability subsidy, and the decommissioning subsidy are rarely so much as mentioned.

Not every country uses a decommissioning subsidy as you should just take the money from the plants during their lifetime and invest it. This is what is happening in Finland and the fund already has more money then the projected decommissioning costs but they still keep pumping more money into them just in case.

They are accounting the tax money going from the government bank account into the owners of power plants. Money that could go to pay for hospitals or schools.

They don't account for theoretical subsidies of money, as then there would be more money in subsidies than there would be money. The theoretical subsidies that currently goes into fossil fuel to pay for global warming is reaching the point of infinitive money in the case that global warming goes beyond the tipping point. Theoretical subsidies are fun thought experiments but they aren't very valuable, as is infinitive money.

The report do account for decommissioning subsidy if there is actually government money going into the hands of power plants owners.

Energy use in Sweden peaks in the winter, and especially a few extremely cold days. The sun literally doesn't rise in the northern parts, and the coldest days have almost no wind (and frankly it's not very strong overall either). This and last year, Swedes are stocking up on firewood, and it's not for cosplaying reason. Several knowledgeable people predict rolling blackouts this winter.

I would love renewables as much as the next guy but there's simply not a chance that Sweden could sustain a winter with the current supply. Importing helps with survival but the prices are insane, since their neighbors are cold as well. Dispatchable or baseload energy is necessary, and thus nuclear is the only option. Sure, it's more expensive than solar panels midday in the desert, but the comparison is irrelevant.

The "northern parts" of Sweden are, by report, already massively oversupplied with hydro power.

Starting nukes with the hope of power in ten or fifteen years will not help keep anybody warm in the meantime.

Transmission lines ought to be quite a lot quicker to complete.

Fun fact: plans were announced a few days ago to build out transmission lines from the north to central Sweden. Cost is projected to be 14 billion SEK, time to completion (in 2036) 14 years:

https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/svenska-kraftnat-miljardinves...

Nuclear is indeed slow, and we wouldn't be in this shitty situation if politicians and journalists would have informed themselves instead of selling dreams and fairy dust. It's not exactly like the rational voices didn't exist. And whaddaya know, look, now reality knocking on the door. What a surprise.

Yes, the north is oversupplied, because they have most of the hydro. Remember though that hydro is a form of storage, so even if the transmission capacity was higher, it'd deplete faster. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I highly doubt that transmission alone can solve the issue long term, even less so the short term ones. Again, dispatchable and/or baseload energy is a MUST. And the people who yesterday sold solar dreams are today selling energy storage dreams. It's the same great story, but it doesn't exist. Nuclear exists, and it's carbon neutral. It's better to start now, then to not start at all or resorting to oil/gas.

There is one good short-medium term effect of the government change, for nuclear. Maintaining and/or restoring the existing reactors could be done much faster than building new ones. Not all reactors in Sweden are operational today.

Wind power is stronger in the winter

Renewables (except hydro) have not driven a grid anywhere in the world, because storage is expensive both in $€ terms and in CO2/kWh terms. Maybe you’ll see the California grid running in 20 years all on renewables + storage at a crazy high cost per kWh and a stupid CO2/kWh compared to nuclear, and that’s just because it’s sunny 300 days a year here!

You dearly wish for storage to be expensive, just as you used to wish solar PV would be. But you were wrong then, and you are wrong now.

I don’t, I want batteries to not pay PGE a shit ton of money. I’ve looked at prices, it’s just not happening.

> No civil nuke plant has ever been operated, anywhere in the world, without massive government subsidies, or by coercing ratepayers to pay well above market rates.

Here in Finland we do.

Only government subsidy is helping with the insurance.

Welcome to HN!

Its all built on very old thinking. Nuclear may have been a good idea in the past, but with the rapid reduction of cost of renewable, especially solar, its no longer worth considering. Building a plant takes a decade, and a decade from now the difference in cost will be even greater. Nuclear will look like huge waste of money then.

Renewables don't give you baseload power. So renewables + nuclear is a good balance.

Renewables + storage will provide massively cheaper baseload power.

Will not happen. ”green” energy is not green- it consume massive amount of resources, it is expensive, short lived, destabilize the grid. I’m super happy my country is finally waking up from the horrible green hypnosis.

It doesn't matter if it consumes resources what matters is that it's less than what it replaces a.k.a. better for the environment.

I see this manipulative arguement used all the time with lithium mining.

How are going to mine resources that doesn’t exist? There is not enough of the metals needed to go full renewable.

False. There is no shortage of any of the materials needed to go fully renewable.

It’s Time to Wake Up - The Currently Known Global Mineral Reserves Will Not Be Sufficient to Supply Enough Metals to Manufacture the Planned Non-fossil Fuel Industrial Systems

https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/

"No matter what minerals will be needed, we will need large quantities of them as the renewable power sources like wind and solar, require extensive mineral resources to manufacture the infrastructure for fossil-free energy.

And there is a challenge. Given the estimated required number of Electric Vehicles (EV’s) of different vehicle class, it is clear that there are not enough minerals in the currently reported global reserves to build just one generation of batteries for all EV’s and stationary power storage, in the global industrial ecosystem as it is today."

Does this take into account recycling? Regardless of if recycling is occurring now.

If there’s not enough minerals to cover all needs, let alone for EVs and power storage only, how is recycling going to help, even if 100% efficient?

The total amount of cars needed each year is a combination of people getting one for the first time and others who are replacing one. That car that is replaced, assuming it's not being resold, is material that could reenter the system.

Also moving pulling back this debate to more general topics:

1.We don't need to replace all cars, many older gas powered cars will still be on the road for a long time which buys time for points 2-4

2. There are other types of batteries, like NiMH, which don't contain lithium. Although these aren't as efficient many hybrids use them, I think the new Mavrick hybrid does (or some truck hybrid)

3. There could be new battery technology that will be invented

4.New technology has helped Tesla make more energy dense batteries and have them last longer

A 2016 model s with the 70kwh battery pack has a 200 miles of range

A 2022 Model s performance with a 98kwh battery pack has a range of 326 miles (this is a touch comparison because the new performance has much more power)

sources: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15104936/tesla-model-... https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...

To put it nice, I would be careful to use that report to back any argument whatsoever. To come up with their conclusion they e.g. basically assumed LFP battery chemistry does not exist. (To be more accurate, they assumed that there is a set amount of nickel/cobalt you need to produce a kWh of lithium batteries) The conclusion also requires that no significant new reserves are found after 2018, which already now is proven false. (Lithium reserves have increased since 2018 by more than what a single generation of EVs need.)

Olympic Dam SA is the world's second biggest uranium mine.

For every 0.6 kg of Uranium it produces, it produces 20kg of copper and 4.5g of silver.

Monosilicon PV is made of sand, copper, silver and aluminum.

A kg of uranium going through a pwr produces about 500GJ (with 3-10% of that being required for milling and enrichment). The 7.5g of silver in the ore that produced that kg of Uranium will produce about 200GJ in its lifetime with technologies in the pipeling that will push this to 400GJ. This silver usage is going down faster than production is increasing. There will be a huge surplus of copper from this source.

The silver is recyclable.

The uranium will require special storage for millenia or reprocessing at a cost not even massively subsidized programs are willing to bear.

The solar energy can be stored in a battery made from sodium, carbon, iron and aluminum. This is basically the composition of dirt. These are being mass produced now and full industrialisation of the supply chain is expected by 2024.

The nuclear reactor requires large quantities of zirconium, molybdenum, chromium, silver, cadmium and many other rare metals. Much of this is radioactive waste at eol.

The nuclear reactor requires more steel than the solar panel requires silicon, and more concrete than the solar panel requires glass and concrete.

A uranium mine can provide nearly as much energy from PV as it does via fission, and will soon produce more. Let that sink in for a bit.

I was curious and searched uranium for breeder reactors: I see that 1KG of Uranium will produce 86000 GJ in a breeder reactor.

The point isn't that PWRs are prohibitive. The point is that renewables are fine in any world where the only existing kind of full scale grid generating nuclear reactor is fine.

Ridiculous claim. What are the assumptions?

Enjoy paying for storage. At least in the US, even if we get storage down from $438/kWh (Jan 2022 grid-scale storage costs) to $200/kWh, consumer electricity prices are expected to rise somewhere between 1400% and 2200% per kWh, and total cost estimates to switch the entire US's power generation + distribution to pure renewables + storage, while maintaining current production and availability levels, are over $430tn, which is >20x the US GDP, according to: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/12/the-cost-of-net-zero-...

Storage cost is falling even faster than solar PV or wind ever did.

.. Last I read even the automotive industry had trouble sourcing batteries. Would be interesting to know how many minutes(seconds?) of electricity we could store in all batteries produces last year should we go all in. This at least battery storage seems naive at such scale.

The overwhelming majority of utility storage is not, and will not be, in batteries. So, your wishful thinking about battery sourcing is wholly irrelevant.

Please stop accusing people of wishing for higher energy prices or being a troll. You have done it on a huge number of posts in this thread. If you want to convince anybody accusing them of wanting something bad is not the way to do it. In fact it makes you look like a troll.

I have no interest in, or expectation of, convincing trolls of anything.

It suffices that readers know they are being trolled.

I've heard of gravity batteries, but they are not a proven technology for utility-scale storage (yet). Can you please elaborate on what utility-scale storage will take the place of our current system whereby production generally scales up and down with demand, which will be more difficult with energy sources that can only produce intermittently like solar and wind? Hydro and wave energy generators look promising for baseline load, but those won't alleviate the need for utility-scale storage altogether, right?

The article I linked acknowledges this, and talks about it. Remember that like with Moore's law, there will eventually be hard, physics-based walls past which we will not progress without entirely new technology paradigms, which aren't guaranteed to be discovered in any finite amount of time.

I'm glad it's getting cheaper, and I'm all for supplementing baseline load with solar, wind, and hydro, but I'm less confident with strategies that ultimately boil down to placing trust in improvements that we may or may not reach.

That's not an assertion that reaching, say, $10/kWh for storage won't be possible, but I think it would be wise to have a plan B in case we're unable to get it lower than, say, $100/kWh.

Not having a Plan B and placing almost all of our eggs in one basket (fossil fuels) is how we got to this point in the first.

Renweable + storage in the form of lithium ion batteries exceeds the cost of nuclear by at least 50%. Some upcoming technologies liek compressed CO2 batteries make make price parity with nuclear a possibility but as of now your comment is incorrect.

Straw man

Renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible. Nuclear is capex dominated, you want to run your nuclear plants at 100% capacity to make a profit. So if you want to mix them with non-dispatchable power like renewables you either have enough nuclear plants to cover 100% of demand (for times when there is no wind and no sun) and make a loss on them most of the time, or you don't and get blackouts.

Storage is the only compatible solution to renewables (that is not fossil fuels). As far as I know renewables+storage are cheaper than 100% nuclear and much faster to build.

No no, this is a little more complicated.

The energy demands in the market right now are very different than what they were even 20 years ago (I mean, who would have imagined crypto mining or large model training in the state it’s in?)

We’re heavily constrained as a society in our use of energy. For example, you don’t just leave the heat/AC on all day when weather conditions demand it, do you?

Similarly, we don’t have massive desalination capacity on the west coast in spite of years of drought with the Pacific right on the coast.

Energy is one of those things that society has no choice but to live within its means on. We can build all the nuclear capacity we want to and yet, may still see future demand in intensive areas such as carbon capture, desalination, supercomputing clusters come up that are great candidates for any buffer capacity we may have, should we be so lucky.

This all goes without mentioning the huge surge of lower income populations that will slowly be increasing consumption over the next few decades. Hundreds of millions(perhaps billions) of people in India, Africa, Asia and South America (The global south) consume very, very little energy today because of financial constraints and development. A lot of these people may not have access to transmission infrastructure for a long time and solar, wind and the like certainly find their use in many such places today.

In short, this is not a zero sum game.

Everyone forgets about Hydro.

Not only can it be a great source of baseload power, but it can also be turned on and off very rapidly to provide peeking capacity.

Pairs very nicely with Wind and Solar if your country has the right terrain for it (which Sweden does, hydro provides 45% of their current capacity).

Correction: Northern Sweden has the right terrain for it. And there's a limit to how much hydro that can be built there, and it's close to built out already.

Which actually makes Nuclear a great idea.

Take the hydro which is currently doing baseload, convert as much capacity as possible to peak loads. And replace the lost baseload with new Nuclear.

That way you can unlock even more capacity for more solar and wind (well... that far north, it will be mostly wind)

You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity. In practice this means natural gas and diesel plants that are off, or coal/nuclear that is being diverted elsewhere when the sun shines/wind blows. The EU grid is pretty well interconnected so excess capacity is pretty easy to sell (up to a point). This is one of the reasons why renewables can be used as a large piece of the total supply.

However, unless time comes when we can deploy multi TWh lithium energy storage (highly unlikely - just look at shortages required for electric cars) or we have grids that can send let's say entire country's worth of capacity from the coast of Norway to Greece on a moment's notice there is no way renewables will ever go beyond few tens of % at the extreme best as measured in proportion of energy actually delivered.

The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side, its other neighbor's conventional (coal) supplies to lean on so we should really consider the entire system not cherry pick parts that fit our narrative.

Am I against renewables? No, I've invested my own money this year into solar (before the war started so I didn't even know how electricity prices will spike) and I am a big proponent of its use where possible. Unfortunately our grid is not built in a way that allows everyone to have solar. At the same time we don't have enough lithium batteries to meet our transportation needs, so thinking we'll have enough for grid level storage is a pipe dream.

People that are for off lining existing nuclear capacity really achieve only increased use of gas/diesel for energy production as well as diminish our industry's competitiveness in the world through extremely high energy costs. This will have zero impact on climate as China will pick up all the slack we leave regarding co2 emissions and some. In fact it may even be worse, because we could've built same products(steel concrete etc) with a mix of nuclear/renewables/small chunk of conventional generation while they mostly use dirty coal.

All we'll achieve by this self industrial devolution is furthering our dependence on countries like China and Russia.

Who said we need to put the solar cells in Sweden? We could put them anywhere. Sweden is already producing enough low cost energy to meet its needs, only prices are high because we are exporting it to other countries willing to pay. If Sweden wants to invest in power for export, we could make that investment anywhere.

> Who said we need to put the solar cells in Sweden?

Having the natural gas in Russia hasn’t really worked out for Sweden. People care about security of supply because national markets are more robust than international ones.

In the direction the world is going, the breakdown of globalization, every country will be required to be self sufficient.

Lucky for Sweden then that they already are?

Time to increase generation capacity by +50% to feed everything we want to use electricity for.

Not self sufficient enough and also depending on weather.

There will be much higher demand of electricity in the close future, e.g. battery factories requires a lot of it.

Carbon free steel is another, true is that some of it the involved companies will provide their own electricity production, but that will not be enough.

But there are also other industry that requires electricity for expansion like food industry, paper mills etc.

Another thing is that Sweden has an unequal distribution of production of electricity, a lot of production (hydro) is far north where fewer live, and little production far south where everyone live.

The nuclear reactors that were shutdown was all in southern Sweden.

It is hard to transport vast amount of electricity from north to south because of limited bandwidth but also because of the newly shutdown nuclear reactors, they provided necessary stability to grid, with them gone it made it harder to transport electricity from north to south.

Another problem is that because of the push on wind power and the shutdown on nuclear power, the electricity system has become much more weather dependent resulting in massive price spikes. That is generally bad for industry that want predictable prices.

This also has the consequence that the electricity price of the continent can infect the price in Sweden because Sweden is connected to the same grid. If temporary shortage in southern Sweden, then import of capacity from the continent is required but with that comes a higher price.

Sweden does have great mountains and hydropower, which makes integrating wind power easier. (Or even some solar too. It's bad in the winter but otherwise tends to anticorrelate with wind, which is good.) And nukes as well.

Also, the international spot power market actually started with Nordpool in the nordics, where it expanded to Europe. The countries in Europe buy and sell electricity all the time and it is a tremendous benefit. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/maps/#/nordic

> You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity.

Are you doing any research before you write stuff like this?! It is trivial to show that this statement is false (let's not even get int the at least). Just look at Germanys capacity,

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Wind and solar are multiple times as big than gas (all other on demand sources are trivial)

Also where are you getting your energy if you need to shut down your nuclear plant for maintanance (or other emergency cases)

This is because Germany does a lot of direct gas/oil heating. If you scroll further down on your own source you will see that gas consumption is actually bigger than renewables.

Northern Europe for the most part switched over to district and electric heating (direct or air/ground pumps) a long time ago.

> The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side,

And before that you set the lithium battery straw man. Read no further. And you are talking about missinformation.

The sun doesn't shine, especially at useful angles, enough and battery technology at scale isn't there. We absolutely need nuclear, essentially no matter the cost, assuming populations of certain countries don't want to use coal.

The overwhelming majority of utility scale storage will not be in batteries, so battery technology does not matter.

The sun does, in fact, shine far, far more than enough.

Ok, I'll bite.

What type of utility scale storage isn't a battery? The answer is, of course: any energy storage setup is a battery[1].

A more generous interpretation of your comment is that you meant won't be chemical batteries.

In which case, I'll bite: what then?

1. Energy storage is the capture of energy produced at one time for use at a later time[1] to reduce imbalances between energy demand and energy production. A device that stores energy is generally called an accumulator or battery.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage

Sweden generates 40% of the current power generation from hydro. Adapt that to be more flexible than baseload and Sweden has amazing capabilities to run an entire renewable grid mainly based on wind with a minimal amount of chemical short-term storage.

There are few countries with better opportunities for renewables than Sweden.

We are in a good place, but our hydro is basically maxed out and can not support a future (with higher consumption) no-wind scenario during winter since it does not have enough power for that alone.

Nuclear power is a good idea, but so is wind for Sweden. We already have a lot of wind but high pressure areas with little wind do exist, even in winter. Nuclear looks kind of good from that point of view, but I strongly feel that Sweden is way too small of an actor to buy reactors on her own, and should actually co-order reactors with other countries, getting the costs down (maybe not even costs, but risks. There have been a lots of bankrupted players in nuclear lately).

In the US we have utility scale pumped storage hydro power which is a non-chemical battery (assuming you’re referring to chemicals other than water).

Pumped hydro only works in certain locations, almost all of which are already used, and any that remain are at the whim of environmental approval.

Hydrogen. However electrolysis is still an immature technology and has massive energy losses in every step of the procedure. You can negate that somewhat if produce and store at the same location of the intended use, like providing electricity to a building with hydrogen tank, hydrogen that is generated by solar panels.

However this is of course not enough to run industries with high electricity demand, what people tend to forget is that one factory (like melting of aluminum) can consume more electricity in one day than an entire city in a year. For that you need nuclear power or hydro.

Hydrolysis has had high losses until recently, but efficiency is now well over 90%.

The remaining problem is building factories for electrolysis equipment. Building factories takes an appallingly long time. But the problem is only of time, not technical maturity.

As we are talking about Sweden, a relatively cold country, a big chunk of energy consumption is about heating. And heat is a form of energy that is much easier to storage than electricity. I very much assume that even seasonal storage of heat is becoming a big thing in coming years, dwarfing any chemical battery capacity whatsoever. After all, for that, in the most basic form, you need a big enough pool of water connected to electric grid with a resistor and to district heating system with a heat exchanger.

> The sun does, in fact, shine far, far more than enough.

Not in northern Europe. For example at the southern most point of Finland there is 3 months in the year when solar produces less than 1% of its name plate capacity. It does get slightly better in the southern part of Sweden but still not that great.

Around Mediterranean is where solar starts to get really good though the Africa side of it is even better.

During winter, when electricity needs are high, northern Europe maybe gets total of 0-6 hours of sunlight, and most of is not the optimal angle or intensity. It's also often overcast, so solar barely generates power.

On the worst winter days, when its -5F, and the energy needs are the highest, there is also no wind.

The Baltic Sea also freezes and there is barely any tidal movement.

There isn't really a renewable that works for Northern European energy needs during winter. Hydro is the exception but it's geo based you can't build unlimited hydroplants and also during winter the water levels are not the highest.

In Europe there is never no wind, and wind generates more power in the winter contrary to nuclear plants.

You also don't need to build unlimited hydro plants.

The government isn't paying to build it. They are only providing loan guarantees, not actual money.

And they only have to pay to shut it down if a future government forces it to shut it down before the plant stops being commercially viable.

The main purpose of both guarantees is to make it much easier for nuclear reactors to get commercial funding from private banks.

Loan guarantees are actual money.

Or, how would you like to provide me loan guarantees? They won't cost you anything. Right?

They are theoretical money that might become real money in the future.

They don't cost the government anything unless a power plant fails and defaults on it's loans. And even the it's not the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between what the bank can recover and the cost of the loan. And if the project got anywhere near completely, there should still be a nuclear power plant.

Given that one of the bigger risks to nuclear power plans are changing government regulations, it's actually a pretty low risk loan guarantee for the government to make. There is a decent chance they will never have to activate the guarantee.

> They are theoretical money that might become real money in the future.

> They don't cost the government anything unless a power plant fails and defaults on it's loans. And even the it's not the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between what the bank can recover and the cost of the loan.

I can't believe we are having this discussion on HN. Are you seriously implying loan guarantees are free?

> And if the project got anywhere near completely, there should still be a nuclear power plant.

Except that is not guaranteed. Historically speaking nuclear power plants have been going massively over budget. So the one thing that seems guaranteed is that the government has to guarantee even more loans.

> Given that one of the bigger risks to nuclear power plans are changing government regulations, it's actually a pretty low risk loan guarantee for the government to make.

Point me to any case where changing government regulations were a significant risk for nuclear power plants. The main risk is that the build goes massively over budget (like what is happening with pretty much every build in recent history), which will make it much more difficult to recover the cost.

>There is a decent chance they will never have to activate the guarantee.,

So if that is the case why do they need it? Private investors should be all over it. The reality is, the risk is high for questionable return. That is why they need the government to step in.

> The government isn't paying to build it. They are only providing loan guarantees, not actual money.

Loan guarantees are actual money, especially if the builder defaults.

> The main purpose of both guarantees is to make it much easier for nuclear reactors to get commercial funding from private banks.

So ask yourself why will commercial funders not give money to the builds, while they are perfectly happy for solar/wind?

Never the less, the financing strategy works. At least in Scandinavia. Defaulting happens rarely enough to not be an issue.

Well-run governments can borrow money much cheaper than private actors. Lower interest rates means a higher chance of success for a long-running project.

Its theoretical money, not actual money. A potential future cost. It only becomes actual money if there is a default.

And in most default scenarios, the government wouldn't have to pay the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between the foreclosure sale price and the remaining loan amount.

> So ask yourself why will commercial funders not give money to the builds, while they are perfectly happy for solar/wind?

First, Solar/wind projects are typically smaller. Less risky to do hundreds or thousands of small projects, spread out over country (or world). The chance of all the projects defaulting at once are small.

Second, one of the biggest risk to nuclear projects are government related. The risk that they might introduce expensive new regulations. Or that the general population (who are typically anti-nuclear) might vote a new anti-nuclear government into power. By having the current government guarantee the loans, future governments will be motivated to not mess with them.

Third, you can't always trust commercial funders to do what's best for the nation, especially from a national security perspective. They might (for example in Germany) decide to rely on cheap natural gas imports from Russia as the primary source of energy, assuming that Russia will always be a stable source of energy forever, and would never start randomly invading it's neighbors.