> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh.

> twenty years

When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.

Heartening to see someone talking about both the pros and cons. I find here and on, for example reddit or twitter, that people are unanimously in favour of Nuclear.

I really don't think costs and delays are well understood. The costs are astronomical and in the UK the cost of energy has been monstrously subsidized. Consumers (public) are paying for this before the plants are running and for hundreds of years after they are running.

I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear however as in terms of base load, sovereignty and environmentally it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot.

But I don't think people really appreciate how expensive it costs the public over the lifetime (even if "day to day" cost per MWh compares favourably with other sources), and how long it takes to get running. Even small modular reactors fail to address this.

> Even small modular reactors fail to address this.

I'd be willing to engage with SMRs on the merits of actually constructed systems, but if you open https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-... and restrict to "operational" all but two of the projects disappear.

One in China and one in Russia.

I doubt they are talking about the same thing as the US companies. So it would be useless to extrapolate their economics.

Not only this, but the benefit of SMR is based on the possibility that they can be mass-produced at low cost. Until that happens, the benefit doesn’t exist. Solar and batteries and wind have already passed that threshold, but cheap mass-produced SMRs don’t exist yet, even if someone can point to a couple of expensive, bespoke SMRs.

It doesn’t really matter if people on HN or Reddit are in favor of nuclear. At the end of the day, nuclear will get built if someone thinks the cost is worth it over the alternatives. The Internet fan club is mostly irrelevant.

How the public understand what they are (or are not) signing up for is critical though.

And what is your median domestic electric unit price? (actually consumed)

It's certainly not £0.01203/kWh, or even in the same order of magnitude.

Later

(For context for non-Brits: there is a price cap of £0.2467 kWh currently, which many people are paying (or very close to that))

That relies on imports of nuclear from France and isn't winter, its easy to say you don't need nuclear when you import a massive amount of others nuclear when the sun doesn't shine as much.

UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.

> renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.

If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?

Renewables are not suitable for replacing nuclear, coal and other traditional sources of energy due to the fact that you cannot control production.

Why do you need to control production? Why not over provision and store?

How?

There's this thing called battery

Battery storage is still very inefficient and doesn't scale to cover the winters in more northern latitutes.

> Why do you need to control production?

Because there's a minimum demand you must be able to supply.

Here in Norway we get just about all our power from hydro, and we have a lot of pumped storage lakes which we use as "water batteries". However, eventually hydro relies on water falling from the sky.

Not long ago there had been some really dry years, and our storage was running at record lows. Had the subsequent year been dry we'd be in a real pickle.

Another aspect here is that production is one thing, but grid-scale renewable production rarely happens right next to the primary consumers, and has to be transported. And the grid might not be able to.

Again here in Norway, we had a situation not long ago where the price difference between the north of Norway and the south of Norway was 100x because the south struggled to produce while the north was overflowing, but there was insufficient capacity on the grid to send all the energy being produced up north down south.

Tell me you've been in coma the past 10 years without telling me you've been in a coma the past 10 years.

Yes. On the other hand nuclear is still single biggest source of power in EU, despite german phaseout) There is still not a single country matching french emissions with ren alone if it doesnt have hydro/geothermal

In my part of Europe (Hungary), on a sunny day we have more energy produced from solar (on top of about 50% nuclear) than we can actually use. Sometimes we're 110% zero-carbon and it's because of solar and nuclear.

As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.

In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.

I am surprised that this is the case after reading how Orban was behaving on the matter of its oil and gas sources. I guess the big problem is that the economy and heating is still very fossil dependent ?

Yes, we can't immediately convert all vehicles to electric and gas boilers to heat pumps, so if we lose access to gas and oil we're kind of screwed.

Orbán had 16 years of unlimited power to diversify from Russia as the only source though, so there's no excuse.

> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.

First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.

I don't understand your point