ViewTrick1002

What are you even saying?

Renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world. They aren't needed anymore.

And now you've shifted the goalposts again. First, nuclear was supposedly cheap and quick. Now it needs enormous government guarantees because renewables have somehow "distorted" the market.

So which way is it? Is new nuclear cheap and competitive, or does it need taxpayers to absorb its financial risks?

You can't have it both ways.

Why should we waste our limited resources on ruinously expensive new nuclear that won't deliver meaningful decarbonization?

The question remains unanswered:

Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?

This must be peak nuclear cultism? Trying to downplay that any evacuation was needed to happen when Fukushima was out of control actively melting down and going through hydrogen explosions.

You are also missing that the evacuation was expanded in stages:

- Accident day: Loss of cooling, 3 km evacuation.

- 1 day after: 10 km. Followed by extended to 20 km when unit 1 exploded. Followed by unit 3 and 4 exploding as well.

What did Japan's nuclear regulators do after Fukushima? They expanded the emergency planning zone from roughly 8 - 10 km to 30 km.

A government press release, a financing conference, an academic abstract and a WEF panel. None of those links demonstrates that new nuclear is cheap or quick.

If new nuclear was cheap and quick, why are the recently proposed western subsidies tens of billions per reactor? This just doesn't add you. You realize that right?

Your own financing conference link acknowledges construction costs in the tens of billions, timelines exceeding a decade and unresolved financing.

The DOE fact sheet lists billions in government support. Does that sound cheap and quick to build?

All the links you've presented looks like an industry despereately public handouts from tax money.

But this is not surprising. The nuclear industry doesn't deliver new projects, it currently has product market fit living on tax money handouts. Presenting PowerPoints they hope to never have to flesh out the details on, since that would requrie them to admit to the costs. Just like mPower and NuScale were forced to do. The now shunned previous golden boys.

The question remains unanswered:

Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?

This revisionist history about military and civilian nuclear being two completely different spheres is getting tiresome.

They were deeply entwined, and still are. The AEC established in 1946 was responsible for both nuclear weaposn and peaceful nuclear technology.

There's been a bunch of civilian dual purpose reactors ran at hanford.

Yes. Much of the waste is from the weapons program. But saying that the site has nothing to do with civilian nuclear plants is just you making stuff up.

It is sad when the premier example touted is South Korea. The country where 68 people received prison sentences totaling 253 years and 9 months from the corruption scandal involving falsified safety certificates, fraudulent components and bribery.

China is also especially funny. Despite the nuke bros perfect environment of stable regulations, cheap workforce, state financing, authoritarian rule and so on nuclear remains insignificant. Sitting at 4% of the grid mix and shrinking. While renewables and storage are absolutely exploding in scale.

This does not seem at all grounded in reality? Just all around misinfomration.

The existing French nuclear fleet was built with enormous state support. Germany pays €18B in EEG support. And that is decreasing as old extremely expensive renewables are leaving the problem.

What you are doing is crying about late 2000s and early 2010s renewables being expensive. Let me ask you, what relevance does that have in 2026? We don't pay those prices today.

The reality in 2026 is the outcome of Flamanville 3, Vogtle, Hinkley point C. Then we have modern projects, and proposed subsidies like:

- Darlington SMR: Close to Vogtle - Polish AP1000: Vogtle like - Czech APR1000: A step below Vogtle. - French EPR2 fleet: Absolutely insane at €100 per MWh and interest free loans alreay assuming large learning effects.

And that is before the usual timeline and budget overruns for new nuclear has happened.

Given this reply it seems like you are straying farther reality since the prospect of new nuclear is crumbling. You're not even presenting a logically sound argument. Its just victim complex and dreaming about times past.

The question to answer still remains: Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?

Given that you've carved out the "realistic" exception for yourself I now presume you will keep shifting goalposts. But I digress.

System costs have been the central argument against renewables ever since they became competitive on LCOE. Which is why energy-system researchers have spent years developing, validating, and publishing models that account for hourly balancing, storage, transmission, flexibility, and sector coupling.

From Denmark to Australia system cost studies find renewable energy systems vastly cheaper than if involving new nuclear. Even when sensitivity testing very low nuclear costs.

The problem with nuclear is that it still needs the same firming to match an actual grid load. It still needs storage and gas turbines.

A smaller quantity than for renewable grids sure. But given how expensive new nuclear is it doesn't matter in the end.

Here's the Danish study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

And Australian:

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

Please tell me how they aren't "realistic".

Your final comment conflates dispatchability with operational flexibility.

Nuclear output is controllable, and French reactors load follow. Although using a fleet controlling which reactor takes which day, and managing their fueling cycle so they can do it.

Conventional nuclear plants are economically optimized for high utilization, cannot start from shutdown on short notice, and don't eliminate the need for capacity that can respond to sudden shortages, demand peaks, and unexpected outages.

There is a significant difference between supplying dependable energy throughout the year and economically covering the relatively few hours when residual demand becomes exceptionally high.

Not sure why you're restricting yourself to only solar and batteries in northern european climate.

We also have, wind, firming and you know. Relying on fossil fuels for the once a decade emergency.

There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test when we still have agriculture, aviation, shipping, construction, chemicals, heavy industry and so on to decarbonize.

System studies from Australia to Denmark are converging on finding that new nuclear makes the system vastly more expensive. Even when assuming your "NOAK" costs. Because no one would be stupid enough to build new nuclear at Vogtle or Flamanville prices.

Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability. It always relied on fossil fuels to solve the hard times.

You raise the floor, but that's quite meaningless when the hard times are far far above the yearly baseload requirement. Even when factoring in scheduling maintenance around it. And theen adding that your nuclear fleet may be like the Swedish or French one and have half the capacity offline when it is needed.

Or the 2026 version. Get massively more results per dollar invested, in a shorter timeframe with renewables and storage.

How many hundreds of billions in subsidies and decades wasted until we reach "NOAK with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain".

The real question is cumulative emissions. Cheap and fast, even if imperfect in the shorter timeframe wins the day.

The question to answer is: Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?

Much earlier. The early nuclear industry, which was shared military and civilian, was incredibly nasty. While also covering up issues. Leaving us with enormous clean up bills to this date.

Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.

The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.

With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.

The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.

What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.

But not anywhere near the nuclear frenzy seen online.

> In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants.

That is not correct. Vattenfall has nothing to do with Oskarshamn, and had nothing to do with Barsebäck.

Forsmark

- Vattenfall: 66.0 %

- Mellansvensk Kraftgrupp (essentially Fortum): 25.5 %

- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 8.5 %

Ringhals

- Vattenfall: 70.44 %

- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 29.56 %

Oskarshamn

- Uniper (through Sydkraft): 54.5 %

- Fortum: 45.5 %

Barsebäck

- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 100 %

Which means new nuclear is about the worst thing we can spend our limited resources on since it won't be coming online until the 2040s, and then at a ruinosuly expensive price.

Meanwhile renewables and storage are reshaping our global energy system due to being the cheapest globally scalable energy source in human history.

We also need to keep in mind nuclear supply chains. After 21 sanction packages the EU still haven't sanctioned Russia's nuclear industry.

We're simply too deeply entangled across the entire supply chain: nuclear fuel, enrichment, reprocessing, technological partnerships, reactor maintenance, new construction and more.

Here's the final report on the blackout from ENTSO-E:

https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib...

From the summary on the page:

> The investigation concludes that the blackout resulted from a combination of many interacting factors, including oscillations, gaps in voltage and reactive power control, differences in voltage regulation practices, rapid output reductions and generator disconnections in Spain, and uneven stabilisation capabilities. These factors led to fast increases of voltage and cascading generation disconnections in Spain, resulting in the blackout in continental Spain and Portugal.

It even models scenarios where they double and triple the available inertia to see if it would have had any effect:

> The above analyses indicate that, even under the assumption of perfect execution of defence plan actions, neither these measures nor additional inertia would have been sufficient to prevent system collapse.

Here's the US regulation from 2016:

> As a result, all newly interconnecting non-synchronous generators will be required to provide reactive power

https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/RM16-1-000....

No this is misinformation that continues to be spread.

The Iberian blackout was caused by a lack of reactive power leading to voltages going out of their designed ranges.

The Iberian grid had adequate inertia at the time.

Reasonable grids have forced inverter based generation to manage reactive power for over a decade. But Spain due to lackluster processes relied on thermal plants to provide it. And they didn’t provide the expected amount.

There were some more confounders around oscillations and what not but the central cause came down to voltage control. Which is near trivial to solve in 2026. If you just force everyone to do it.

That is ancillary services. And where all battery implementations started before saturating those marketss.

We've now past that and batteries are actively killing the business case for fossil gas peakers while renewables are doing the same for legacy thermal producers.

Why is it irrelevant? There has been recent research on just this question. It is still in its infancy with simplified models but their findings suggest that as grids decarbonize, storage will increasingly take over the price setting role traditionally played by conventional generators.

The new merit order: The viability of energy-only electricity markets with only intermittent renewable energy sources and grid-scale storage

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014098832...

It does. At some point the next marginal investor looks at the market and can’t make their money back.

But it is a problem for legacy thermal electricity producers being undercut by renewables and storage.

Which is why we have ancillary services and grid regulations.

We aim for those to be real-time markets as well. But for some services that doesn’t fit so we instead buy the services on longer contracts.

The goal is of course to have the ancillary services to be as small and few as possible since it is a supplement creating market based pricing for the things the marginal net energy market itself doesn’t provide adequately today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services

System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear from Australia to Denmark and Finland.

Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway.

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

What are these grid operators and researchers missing that you know?

Add a bit of firming and you can. Or just accept a tiny bit of fossil fuels. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

We still need to decarbonize agriculture, chemicals, aviation, shipping, heavy industry, construction and so on. Most of which use either chemical energy carriers, or fossil feedstock.

Siphoning off a tiny bit off that for grid firming duty is trivial. Or do sustainable biofuels from food waste and so on.

Which is also what the system studies lands on. Finding that adding new nuclear makes it far more expensive.

Not really given how ruinously expensive it is? Isn’t the most decarbonization per dollar the fastest what matters?

Which is crying over spilled milk. We live in 2026.

Today renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history, and is reshaping the global energy system.

Given that Germany's coal burning levels are the lowest in over 70 years please do explain how Germany replaced nuclear with coal.

I just can't comprehend why some people get so upset by Germany.

In my experience LLMs tend to work far better when they have a tree of structured information to search through and change.

Compared to poking at a mungy ball of accidental state where every change introduces complexity for the future which every downstream agent needs to correctly find.

This comment doesn’t seem aligned with reality?

System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear in both Denmark and Finland.

The thermal plant you are complain about mothballed one of its two burners last autumn when the contract for firm emergency reserve capacity ended.

The final burner stayed open only with a new emergency reserve contract. Last time I checked it has ran like 50-100 hours per year. Never being called in as emergency reserve, although stepping up to hot standby a few times.

They also reactivated a mothballed CCGT plant in the same region for emergency reserve duties. But that was based on the war in Ukraine and ensuring local preparedness rather than needing the electricity.

That’s a backwards looking metric. You’re complaining that late 2000s renewable were expensive.

The problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t solve stability. When cold spells hit Europe the French exports turn into imports. So all the French neighbors needs enough backup capacity, generally fossil based today, to both make up for the French exports vanishing, they experiencing the same cold spell, and exporting to France.

Stick two French grids next to each other and they would quickly collapse due to how brittle they are.

And nuclear power is the worst solution imaginable to do firming for renewables.

You need something with low CAPEX to do that. Which is the complete opposite of nuclear power.

Because they aren’t when you look at wholesale costs?

Either way. France is wholly unable to build new nuclear given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and the ruinously expensive proposed subsides for the EPR2 fleet.

While Germany still pays for expensive early renewables. Back before the industry exploded in scale.

The relevant question is where to spend the next 100b to get the most decarbonization the fastest, today.

That’s not what we are seeing in reality. In Spain the nuclear plants massively load follow. Same as I just mentioned they do in Sweden.

Pretending they can just do “baseload” in 2026 doesn’t work. They can bid negative, but that’s just extending the life of the plant a few extra years.

And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available.

And this is today a purely physical problem. You only need to look to Australia to see grids where rooftop solar today crowds out all other sources, even utility scale renewables. How do you force them to buy ruinously expensive grid based nuclear?

A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.

Gas turbines are cheap in CAPEX and expensive in OPEX. They can cope with it, although even they have trouble with the sliver of hours left after solar, wind and storage make up the bulk. Since that’s a far slimmer portion than their bread and butter peaking style of operation

The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.

We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.

And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.

Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.