Kon5ole
Edit: I found this piece interesting, if a bit bleak. The prose reminded me a little of William Gibson.
It'd be like Tesla entering the oil refinery business or Waymo starting driving schools.
Nuclear is much scarier. Your argument fails to account for the extreme effort spent in order to keep it safe!
In the US, high explosives kill fewer people per year than painkillers. Despite this extraordinary statistic, we're not about to let anyone buy high explosives over the counter. Because we know that high explosives are in fact, much more dangerous than painkillers.
Same goes for nuclear. We have kept it safe(ish) so far, but we know what can happen if we don't.
Well, there are a few plants in the US (for example Kewaunee, rancho seco) that were closed for not being profitable. In one instance the owner took an over 300M usd write-off instead of continuing operations. So it measured too high there.
The explanation is likely that the 0.02677 is not the actual total costs of operations. In fact the report states it plainly on page 2: "not the full cost of owning and operating a nuclear plant."
I fully support your idea to identify ALL the costs not just for nuclear, but let's start with nuclear, since that's clearly where the largest misconception exists today.
>Proposing e-fuels is basically saying we should use a battery with higher conversion losses.
Thats dismissive, it is also a basically limitless capacity battery. We already have periods of 0 electricity costs, more electricity than we know what we can do with. This will increase, and having it generate e-fuel would be a nice option for it.
My statement was based on findings from a few of the plants on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_nuclear_po...
Assembling operating costs is tricky, you will have to do some work. I arrived at around 400M USD/year but there is a big span depending on the size of the plant and other things. I also didn't check most of the plants, so I could be way off when all of them are considered but I don't think so. The figure is in the ballpark for some of the EU plants as well.
I did not inflation-adjust the construction costs, since they are not affected by inflation. They were paid "back then", not now. Construction costs are of course affected by interest on the loans, but that's a separate thing from both inflation and the construction costs, and it stops when the loan is paid. Makes sense?
You may feel this is unfair and that the construction costs should be inflation adjusted, but it actually doesn't matter because we have several examples of plants where construction was long-since paid still being closed.
Which means that even with construction costs being 0, plants close because they are too expensive. So why are we thinking construction costs are the key to making nuclear viable?
The best current plants from a running costs perspective are the ones that have several large reactors that produce lots of electricity with shared overhead in staffing etc.
Which makes the current chase for cheaper production by making many small reactors seem particularly misguided. It's not only solving the wrong problem but actually worsening the more important problem.
If we learn that even if we make new nuclear as cheap as old nuclear, it's is still not cheap enough, surely it is a very useful comparison?
It's not useful if the goal is to defend nuclear at all costs, I'll give you that, but that's not a worthy goal.
>And then the question is, what's the most economical way to get those things?
Absolutely, and that's why finding out the real, actual truth of the costs is very important.
If you add the true cost to society from things like Sellafield, Asse II, the interest-free loans, the army personnel and national labs handling waste, the decades of countermeasures for Chernobyl in dozens of countries and so on - if you add upp all that, perhaps generating e-fuel is actually cheaper than nuclear?
If not already, the Chinese have taught us that once you get the wheels rolling, prices decimate pretty rapidly. They made solar and batteries viable, maybe we could do e-fuels?
Synthetic fuel, batteries everywhere, pumped storage, geothermal, gravity, pressurized air, heated salt - maybe all of those are actually cheaper than nuclear, if we really add up ALL the costs of nuclear?
One would think! But no, all US plants except Vogtle and Watts are paid off long ago.
Now, why did you just throw that out there without checking? Are you not interested in knowing the truth, you just want to argue for nuclear no matter what the facts say?
If so, let me assure you that neither one of us will enjoy a continued discourse on the topic.
Just have to say though - that the Swedish reactors were closed because electricity was cheap is the point. Sweden basically stated that even when paid off, nuclear can't survive if electricity is cheap. But surely we, the taxpayers and businesses and industries, want it to be cheap?
That's a common claim but it's not really correct.
Firstly, the average plant in the US spends it's construction costs every 2-3 years, I assume the situation is similar in the EU. New power plants are much more expensive of course, because the old ones were built before Chernobyl, Fukushima, 9/11 and other incidents that revealed horrible security flaws in existing plants and procedures.
Secondly, the costs of handling Chernobyl are way, way higher than the total cost of construction for all nuclear plants in the EU combined. Similarly the cost of managing Fukushima is way higher than the cost of constructing all the nuclear plants in Japan. These costs are of course never added to the cost of nuclear power, since nobody operating nuclear plants has any chance of paying such sums. But they are in fact a larger factor than the construction costs were.
These experiences did have some effect, thankfully, in that made new power plants more expensive, because we know that we must take any conceivable measure to prevent more Chernobyls and Fukushimas from happening.
And thirdly, the reason why Sweden closed the two most recent reactors was cost, despite them being paid off a long time ago. Meaning there is significant cost even after the construction is paid.
So it seems that the claim that "construction is the main cost" comes from the operator's point of view. Basically "the construction is the largest part WE have to pay, because taxpayers cover the rest".
What assertion are you lacking citation for? The hubble and webb telescopes vs the ??? communist space telescopes? Tony Hawk vs the ??? communist skater? John Carmack vs the ??? communist game developer? VW and Toyotas 20 million cars per year vs Trabant?
Maybe you could provide some examples of how communism has provided opportunities to all in a way that capitalism hasn't?
The industrial revolution took at least a century depending on how you count, and it created more jobs than it destroyed.
The introduction of computers obliterated whole office floors of employees at banks and insurance companies but it created even more work at companies that sold computers and software and consultant hours.
Ai takes millions of jobs and replaces them with a few thousand caretakers at megawatt datacenters. The workforce at Anthropic and OpenAI is comparable to a game development studio. If all they end up doing is reducing the workforce of JP Morgan by 10%, society still has a net loss of jobs.
That said, it's at least possible Ai will eventually end up creating a bunch of new work indirectly, by enabling people to do more than they ever imagined they could. One can hope.
It's a catch-22 for the companies as well, since white collar work is presumably done because a company has customers, and most of their customers are white collar workers. At least in the US and Europe.
I agree but it's also better. On average for most programming tasks I think humans are as "defeated" as coders as we are as chess players.
The machines will not only be as good or better than you at the DB design, the business logic, the performance critical algorithms, the UX, the performance tweaks, the accessibility standards, security holes, browser compatibilities, laws and regulations and whatever else you need to make the whole solution.
It will also write user manuals in any language, and rewrite them when needed even on a friday evening. It absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are DE...wait, I mean DONE!
So the situation for coders is even worse than it was for the weavers. The machine delivers not only cheaper and faster, but also better. :-/
I think a better summary is that capitalism creates more opportunities for all. Not equal, just more.
It creates more food, more clothes, more libraries, symphony orchestras, skateboard parks, cars, ships, planes, particle accelerators and space telescopes than any other system we have come up with, which means more opportunities for people wanting to be pilots, captains, skateboarders, scientists or violinists.
Whenever someone has tried to remove the inequality aspect of this, it has resulted in a loss in opportunities for all. Including the opportunity to have food every day.
CD's, LP's, 8-tracks, CRT's, minidisc, microcassettes, VHS, Jaz and Zip drives, laserdiscs. Needed lasers, magnet sensors, tiny motors, gears and whatnot.
Today everything seems to be a chip in a box and still it's often more expensive.
It sure used to be, but I think battery backups that cover a whole house for 24h is cheaper than a diesel generator that can do the same now. Depending on your situation you can make it back in savings even without solar panels. (Charge when electricity is cheap, use when expensive).
Piped gas generators is a thing I had no idea existed until now! Edit: Curious to learn if they are a common thing?
Combine it with rooftop solar to get the equivalent of free fuel for your generator every time the sun shines.
Right now it's like "whoopsie our experiment hacked another co because we have no control over our experiments" and the reaction is like "What's that old boy?" from people having no clue what it all means. There are no consequences, no guardrails, and the "voluntary slowdown" is just words.
An experimental agent run from Anthropic or OpenAI or someone else can already cause deaths. They can order hits, dox political dissidents, locate people with secret identities, alter medicine prescriptions. It shouldn't have to actually happen before legislation catches up.
This happens daily even with the token-limited models customers run, and even more so when Anthropic & co run agents basically unlimited on large percentages on their total compute capacity.
It's not nonsense but you made a different statement than I.
Switzerland doesn't use market prices. Electricity in Switzerland is regulated so they pay vastly more than the european market at most times.
This Sunday for example, Germany enjoyed spot wholesale prices of 2 centimes per kWh while Switzerland had 12. You can verify the German prices on nordpool and an equivalent swiss energy market site.
Citizens in Switzerland pay much more than wholesale, averaging over 20 centimes last year. They are forced to do so by regulations.
When you force your population, aka the taxpayers, to pay 5-10x as much for electricity as it costs in the open market you using taxpayer money to subsidize electricity.
You follow?
>Edf was not bailed out. It was renationalized
Thats synonymous, and it was actually the second time EDF were bailed out, France had to pay for the overruns on the plant in Finland too. Lucky Finland!
The mechanism varies by country, but the bottom line is that taxpayers always have to pay for nuclear. They have no choice.
There is no option to walk away, you can't leave it, it has to be taken care of. Every other power plant you can shut down and walk away but nuclear is, again, unique in this respect.
When all the swiss nuclear operators go bankrupt, the swiss will still have to pay people to operate the plants, or decommision them, and then store the waste, for longer than Rolex has existed as a company.
Nobody else will. So it's the taxpayers, always.
>by some absurd reason nobody can cool the spent fuel to avoid boiling,
Absurd reasons are not that uncommon. War for example. Also, landslides, earthquakes, terrorists, pandemics, sinkholes. Stupid politicians. Lots of things. Non-zero.
>something much more terrible happened,
The spent fuel fire will be the most terrible thing that happened that day, unless the cause was an actual nuclear weapon strike.
Or well, since it's Switzerland I guess CERN could have come up with something worse but I can't imagine what. ;-)
The permanent truth phase yes. Coal is so much safer than nuclear that a comparison is hardly meaningful.
Let me put it this way - If coal power plants were run with as much security as nuclear plants they wouldn't kill mosquitoes sleeping in their chimneys. If nuclear power plants were run with as little security as coal plants however, we would not be here to have this discussion.
You seem to be well aware of the dangers of fossil fuels, but you come across as entirely ignorant of the dangers of nuclear power. Good decisions need knowledge of both.
I'm as anti coal as I am anti nuclear because both are terrible ideas. Renewables, batteries, e-fuels and other storage options are here now. They're better, faster, cheaper, safer. Let's do that.
Of course not, if I did that's 20 000 dead from a "nuclear accident" right there. But that would be dishonest and silly, and I aim for rationality.
>And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China
Not even if you assign all the blame of global warming to chinese coal plants would this be even remotely true.
>I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.
You responded to a claim that no other power plant represent as great a risk at a nuclear power plant.
Maybe you should have created a new thread saying something like "a nuclear plant is not as bad as the entire fossil fuel industry worldwide"? ;-)
>The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives
You completely ignored the facts that clearly tell you that the consequences are orders of magnitude worse.
That's no way to convince anyone. Just saying.
But I also think that what we have today in Gnome and KDE is pretty good, and a part of the problem is that people don't realize how good they can be.
I think demo videos showing actual power users doing real work in each of the major DE's would go a long way. Part of the allure of tiling VM's is that they are an efficient way to work for certain types of users, but part of it is that those users are advocates and have impressive demo videos showing exactly how tiling VM's can be awesome, while a Gnome or KDE user is left to kind of figure it out, or worse, discover how they differ from a familiar windows or macos.
(I may be unaware of a great source of exactly what I ask for and if so please tell me!)
I'll also grant that Apple has gotten more boring with age - the G4 imac is still the coolest computer I've seen to this day. Just so outrageously out there. Current offerings are efficient but a bit boring. Apple Silicon could make something like the trashcan design work, when it basically failed with x86 PC components.
Having said all that I wouldn't mind seeing an ecosystem of ARM-based components even if they followed the ATX standard. Being able to buy an ARM-compatible motherboard and upgrade my ARM-based CPU and pair it with separate RAM and SSD's would be nice!
It's not, the estimated production cost for existing swiss nuclear plants is 4-6 centimes per kWh, which is already expensive electricity and frequently higher than the market prices today. That is also the self-cost price, meaning whenever the market pays less for electricity, ch nuclear plants lose money.
And as always, swiss taxpayers cover that loss so you won't ever see it in the operators financial reports.
Also worth noting is that EDF in France sells for 7 cents after being bailed out when sellng at 4 cents. This is not cheap electricity.
> What non zero chance of millions of casualties?
Just to take one trivial example:
If nobody is able to refill the water in spent fuel pools at any nuclear plant, they will catch fire. Assuming a radial spread of the fallout it will be near guaranteed lethal for at least 50 miles, probably lethal for some 500 miles, and you "won't want to live there" for even further than that. And this will remain the case for millennia to decades, depending on weather and distance.
So basically 500 miles radius, uninhabitable for several generations if you run out of water.
Then consider that Switzerland is covered by a circle of some 120 miles, and has a population of several million.
Do you think the 4-6 centimes per kWh covers a scenario like that? I don't. Good thing Switzerland has lots of water...
What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.
The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding. Estimates range from 26000 to 240000 people dead, but rationally one has to assume the typhoon would have caused some damage in these areas even without the dams.
So claiming this was a single hydro dam causing 250 000 dead is hardly rational.
If you live in a narrow valley downstream from a dam you are aware of the danger. You as an individual can take action to protect yourself. If you live upstream by even 10 feet you are in no danger at all from the dam.
With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.
Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima. Also it wasn't a power plant, not even indirectly as oil is mostly used for transportation, not electricity. Chernobyl and Fukushima were power plants.
So again, there is just no comparison between nuclear plants and any other power plant. Nuclear really does have a unique level of risk.
Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood, and for nuclear the consequence is immense. Meaning effort has to be spent keeping the likelihood extremely small, in order for the risk to be low.
This has to be accepted and considered in any discussion about nuclear power. Pretending it doesn't exist is not rational.
I agree completely and would go so far as to claim that presently in 2026 that money-transfer mechanism is the real motivation for any nuclear project in any country. Renewable options are the better path now from a technical point, but politicians and their buddies can't easily make as much money from that.
That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.
The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.
Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.
>t's that or buying gas from Russia.
Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.
And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?