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Is that because every country fails to adequately charge oil/coal/etc for its externalities? Are we essentially subsidizing oil, bringing the costs artificially low such that nuclear can't compete?

That... doesn't seem true?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.

Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.

Profit is not everything.

> That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.

Spot on. That, plus... peak oil.

>I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable.

This is comparing to the base case of fossil fuels. But those have tremendous negative consequences.

But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.

Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.

Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).

The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.

Off topic, but this guy on youtube is a knowledgeable (pro-nuke) resource.

https://www.youtube.com/@tfolsenuclear

I am not sure what you mean by profitable here?

Yes, while we’re looking at expenses, add the military to oil.

Why the myopic focus on profitability? Only one nation has succeeded in making healthcare profitable, please tell us how that has led to the best outcome for society?

This is wrong, Germanies Konvoi where immensely profitable. The greens complained about these as money printing machines.

What exactly does it mean for a powerplan in china or russia to be profitable?

China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities…

…and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.

Why would we choose a more expensive form of energy rather than cheaper forms?

There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.

Most electricity and infrastructure is profitable. But not after carving it out in a way that looks at it in complete isolation. Just like train infrastructure creates a lot of business around the area of the train infrastructure, even if the train itself may seem not self sustained.

I'm fairly sure that the total economic value that we get out of roads far exceeds the cost it takes to create and maintain them, yes. A similar argument can probably be made for justice systems and armies.

If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful. I think that's what we're talking about here.

Not sure about profitable but the lower the cost is the generate electricity, the better off the world will be. Cracking energy is, to state the obvious, a huge unlock.

It does not. But there are so many sources that can be. And easily at that. So why go this route?

Those things you pay for indirectly via taxes. Electricity you pay for directly. you can build unprofitable economically uncompetitive power, like nukes, and your rates will go up. People tend not to like that, but you can do it.

Because in their wisdom the politicians have created energy markets.

The costs for generating electricity needs to be paid for somehow.

Having the consumers of the electricity pay for has a lot of advantages!

Oh boy, they are sooooo profitable that there are wars around them.

That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.

In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.

Which proven French technology?

Given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and that the proposed subsidies for the EPR2 fleet are ruinously expensive France is unable to build competitive new nuclear.

It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.

The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.

About the last question, i don't think the old plants will play any part in this eventual return.

can you link to data to prove the economics are bad?

Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"

Two words: base load

And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)

Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.

I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.

Prefab & faster construction possibilities would be a big one.

Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels.

In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.

This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.

I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.

Because Trump is pushing SMR on all "allies", UK, Japan, Italy:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzevzwxwro

I couldn't find immediate investments from Kushner etc., but will dig further.

It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even.

This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.

Yes no real cons if we exclude the small con of being completely economically unviable.

Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.

> it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources.

The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).

So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.

>Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment,

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?

Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society.

It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.

To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.

How about nuclear fuel still being dependent on either russia or us? and that is just one reason.

> Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment

... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)

People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up.

That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.

To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.

I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.

> upgrade civilization to the next level

Why?

Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.

Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.

Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?

> upgrade civilization to the next level

What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?

Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?

Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar.

I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.

> Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change.

But nobody asked, there hasn't been a third referendum.

I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.

His ignorance is on full display when he said plutonium.