The technology of electricity production has advanced since nuclear peaked in the mid 1980s.
We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator.
Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part.
All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive.
Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.
We deploy 10x the capacity in renewables and batteries than we do in nuclear and its only accelerating. We are trending towards 1/10th the cost of nuclear per GW. There is no going back just due to the sheer scale of mass manufacturing renewables.
We are below $1B/GW for solar.
China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year.
Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years
I am a small-time investor in renewable energy businesses, but I am also a believer in nuclear energy.
Consider a city like Mumbai that needs about 3.8 GW per day. One would need lots of windmills and large solar farms that would need to be positioned in a different state having more sunlight throughout the year. Mumbai often experiences cloudy weather and intermittent wind. I cannot imagine only wind and solar supporting the needs of Mumbai.
There are countries other than the US who do not take 20 years to build a reactor. Out-dated regulations, punitive paperwork, and perhaps poor project management are the reasons for the oft-cited delays in the US. Other countries complete their builds in 6 to 7 years. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
The US delays with the Vogtle AP-1000s (the only recently completed US build) were extremely atypical.
First, it was a FOAK design. Which always takes longer to build, it is a prototype.
Second, the nuclear build know how in the nuclear engineers, construction workers, and supply chain was not really there any longer.
Third, they used a new permitting system, which in theory should have been better and probably will be better in the future: instead of ongoing individual checks and modifications, which made every nuclear power plant in the US a unique unicorn, you are now allowed to submit a master design and once approved you can build that over and over. Without changes.
Alas, Westinghouse wasn't actually done with the design when they submitted. So when they started building, they noticed that they had submitted plans that could not actually be built. Oops. That cause massive delays. And delays = cost.
And the suppliers fought each other, one went bankrupt etc. COVID also didn't help.
So how can we guarantee that the same won't happen in the future and that NOAK builds will be better? Well, for one they now have plans that are obviously buildable, because a bunch of AP-1000s have been built. So that exact thing absolutely can't happen.
Also, we can look to China. Turns out, China also built 2 FOAK AP-1000s. These also took about 10 years, despite China usually building in 5. And it turns out, China built some more AP-1000s after that. NOAK builds. And these took 5 years to build with buildable plans, experience building that reactors and a mature nuclear industry to back them.
So there is good reason to believe that future NOAK builds of the AP-1000 and of comparable reactors will be much faster and much cheaper than what we've seen so far.
Delays and cost overruns for nuclear are absolutely not atypical. Pick anywhere in the world you want and you’ll find them building reactors easy 50% over time and budget, and many >100%.
Germany shows how trying to rely solely on renewables is a fool's errand.
They can go from having over 50% of their electricity generated from renewables, but then suddenly it falls to barely over 20% in a single day.
But the low production can last multiple days (for reference, look at the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of December 2025).
For reference, to store a single day of Germany's electricity at the current battery storage price ($66/kwh) you would need over a hundred billion dollars. Even if battery storage is to be divided by 3 in the coming years, we are still talking tens of billions of dollars for something that isn't even reliable and has a hard limit (go over the 3 days of storage capacity, too bad, you're fucked).
Even considering how nuclear construction is stupidly expensive nowadays, that would still be cheaper and more reliable (in large part thanks to German bureaucracy, fuck you by the way for the sabotage at Flamanville).
Renewable is the German superiority complex applied at scale. They can't help themselves from overengineering cars, so that makes sense.
Also, Germany currently has the problem of much more and more reliable wind generation in the north, but not enough network capacity to send it all south when needed. It is being addressed, but as expected, it is very complicated because infrastructure across the whole country touches the interests of a lot of groups with very different interests.
We might need much better tunnel building equipment and a deep sub-terranean network... (useful sci-fi idea, needs to be able to cope with mild earth quakes in some regions).
Gas-fired power plants are planned for load balancing, and these are already being built in such a way that they can be converted to hydrogen operation at a later date.
You can move slider for last 24hrs, there were sunny bits in Germany.
CO2 is constantly shit over here.
And yeah.. what am I supposed to do when it's not sunny or no wind? Fart into windfarm?
This! Don't be disappointed by the downvotes. The fussile+nuclear energy lobby is desparte because of Germany's success. This industry is the equivalent of the tabacoo and pestizide industry of the past. Everything is fine, cheap and under control -- until it isn't ...
Since the capacity factor is so much lower, 10x in capacity just about matches the energy production of nuclear. Never mind the dispatchable power.
And since nuclear power plants last about 4x longer than renewables, you actually have to install 4x the production to have an equivalent fleet over time.
So by your numbers, the world is shifting towards a nuclear fleet.
An initial much stronger increase in renewables is a logical an unavoidable consequence of what I described.
The increase in renewable production needs to be 4x greater initially, because of the longer life of nuclear plants. Queueing theory/Little's Law. So this is entirely expected if you are targeting (a) a fairly constant fleet and (b) fairly constant production rate, both of which are desirable.
Under the Messmer plan, France ignored this and built 50+ reactors in 15 years. Which means that they were pretty much done after 15 years, their nuclear industry had basically nothing to do for the next 40 or so years and withered. Bad idea.
The current rate of new construction starts in China implies a build rate of at least 10 reactors per year. With an expected life of 80 years, that implies a target fleet size of around 800 reactors if the rate remains constant.
The problem is that much of Europe lies pretty far north. Certainly, Spain can deploy solar power with high efficiency, but Netherlands can't grab as much sunlight no matter what, to say nothing of Sweden or Norway. Wind power helps, but it's way more expensive than solar.
How is it stalling anything if it offers a cheaper and faster build than nuclear? If you need to build 1GW and want it anytime in the next 2 decades, you sure as hell don’t choose nuclear. You either do natural gas or renewables these days. Those are the only competitive sources of energy.
You actually need energy even when the sun doesn't shine.
And you are incorrect: renewables are not competitive without heavy subsidies and preferential treatment, such as being allowed to shift the cost of their intermittency onto the reliable producers.
The problems lies in the lack of storage. Which is why you need efficient and scalable battery technologies. This is the true key technology that yields much more promise than anything nuclear.
That cost is a property of the regulatory environment, it isn't intrinsic.
You can buy a floating nuclear power plant in the form of an aircraft carrier for a lot less than $16B. The US Navy builds these things as a matter of course in a few years using standard designs they crank out by the dozens.
Those carriers have 700MW thermal output reactors. The new generation EPRs built now are about 6x that.
And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is)
Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
Since you use China as a comparison for solar: China builds 1.4GW nuclear power plants in 5 years for $3.5 bn.
And of course the capacity factor for PV is about 10%, so you need 10x the capacity to get the same output even on average. Never mind that you get nothing at night, and very little in winter.
>>It is important to note that within Germany’s generation data, Ember’s analysis has identified an unusual trend of declining solar irradiance-adjusted performance over the past several years. We do not yet have a definitive explanation for why this is, but it could be related to challenges in measuring behind-the-meter solar generation, exacerbated recently by high levels of residential battery storage. Regardless of the cause, it is possible that there is under-reporting of German solar generation.
Why did you try to completely change the subject to "baseload" solar rather than your previous point of "cannibalizing/curtailment"?
I will take that as an admission that storage will unlock the curtailed/cannibalized renewables and further reduce the economic outlook for any fuel driven electricity generation like coal, gas and nuclear power.
Look at the boom of nuclear in the 70s. The industry wide and deep expertise from production, to planning, to logistics. Particularly the french did this par excellence. But nuclear has first languished and is now almost non-existent in Europe.
Contrary to capitalist believe you cannot solve all issues fast by throwing unreasonable amounts of money at it. You must built industries that synergies with each other, have deep institutional knowledge and capable workers that can deliver the tiny tolerances required to make nuclear safe and effective.
We simply do not have the (intellectual) capacity for this anymore and the effort is better spent on battery technology if Europe actually wants to have any stake in future of EV and renewables. It is significantly less capital intense too.
> In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month
This is terrible.
In Germany (major city) I pay 166 Eur a month for two cars, one normal (premium brand) family car and second being V8 coupe. I make about 25000km a year in total and have 6 years no claims. No accidents in my driving history (over 15 years).
Price is for full coverage with low excess.
Have you ever ridden a bike over a canal? The ad was pushed in front of a lot of people who have. I thought it was creepy throughout, but I can't believe they used that clip up front.
I worked with Vanja before EVs were mass produced, he is very driven and smart, but also eccentric. With his previous experience with Mercedes Electric repair he figured out that, sooner or later repair/knowledge/tools will get commoditized, so push at the start and try to get a big foothold/mindshare before this happens. Very few people actually have the knowledge to judge your work early on, so you can get very far if you are intentionally promoting yourself and behaving very confident.
His Tesla Battery cell repair stuff, anyone that was near a open battery knows it's fucking dangerous thing that has VERY low chance of actually working in medium term - but it gets him a lot of respect by clueless people. But he also does good stuff, but his image and reality are VERY different things.
> In the early days of New Orleans, the pieces of the casket were removed and burned, while the remains were pushed to the back of the tomb, falling into an underground chamber called a caveau (This is where the phrase, "I wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole comes from... the pole being the device used to push remains to the back of the tomb).
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