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this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Beginning investments nuclear at this point when renewables so obviously to everyone in the know are beating them on all accounts is extremely on brand for someone as dumb as Trump
Nuclear is the single best technology humans have invented. A broken clock is right twice a day.
Being able to harness the power of atoms is cool, but directly harnessing the power of a star is arguably far cooler.
I'm confused as to what you think powers a star.
solar panels, duhh. why'd you think they were called that?
Well both of you are incorrect because a star is when gravity creates enough energy to cause nuclear fusion.
Nuclear doesn't scale globally and it's not renewable. It's contribution to humankind's power generation negligible and it will stay that way.
Nuclear is great and all but only when done safely.
diaper donny is saying "donny like fire, make more fire, donny no care where make fire, fire must be more since i say fire good"
This will end up with everyone burning down everything.
Nope, today nuclear actually makes sense. Renewables are cool and relatively cheap but only as long as they output power. Then what? Spin up that coal power plant such as during night? And produce a ton of climate warming co2 and a lot of pollution. The problem is that we don't have energy storage nor a viable solution for it. Said that, cutting corners is a big no-no.
Nuclear doesn't make sense for that purpose because it'd have to quickly be able to spin up and down. Most reactor designs aren't really able to do it quickly in normal operations, and those that can can't do so in a way that makes any economic sense. They're financially outcompeted by their alternatives.
Storage is the solution, which we can build today in a viable way and is rapidly becoming cheaper and cheaper.
The financial case for nuclear today is shoddy at best. It's why no company wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole unless heavy government subsidies are involved. The case for nuclear in ten years is, given the continuous advancements in renewable energy costs and battery storage tech, almost certainly dead.
Yes, you are right about nuclear output flexibility. Their purpose is to provide stable output, not chime in when required - and that's the problem with renewables - there is no good solution to compensate when they are not producing. Feel free to list those alternative reliable solutions.
And I have yet to see real energy storage data. All I read is just "energy storage is the solution (which, of course, it is, someday)" yadda yadda. So, numbers, please.
Our best current alternative option that's already there is sadly gas. It's fast, cheap and emissions are not the worst of the bunch. Still bad though.
As far as battery storage is concerned, battery prices have dropped 97% in the last three decades (and it's still dropping quite quickly). See https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline for a pretty good overview. And that's not taking into account other forms of energy storage like water-based storage or new batteries based on sodium.
The batteries we have now are already cheap enough to purchase for individual customers, and including solar panels means it's already possible to effectively take houses off the grid. In 10 years those prices will be 50-25% of their current price in pessimistic scenarios. Solar is dropping in price at similar rates.
Yep, gas is a good climate warming enabler. Which we want to avoid since we are fighting climate warming - funny eh, that renewables instead of nuclear causes more gas/coal being burned.
As for batteries, perhaps, but today we don't have any of those at scale required. And while houses could get off grid today with li-ion batteries where lithium is not infinite (nor are rare earths required), it doesn't solve cities and industry or energy storage at scale. Plus those batteries tend to catch fire which is hard to extinguish. Water based storage is limited by geography. And so on.
If we got our head out of our ass and invested into battery tech - e.g. sodium-ion batteries or proton batteries, we could very quickly build sustainable energy storage instead of relying on technology that is potentially dangerous or continuing to rely on fossil fuels.
Nuclear has similar but opposite problem of renewables. Its hard to tune down and back up in power output, and its economics require near full capacity, and high market prices,to justify them.
Renewables are always better, because they don't need as high market electricity prices, they have short and modular development times, modular battery addition.
Nuclear projects require suppression of renewables to ensure limited competition in supply, when they are finally built.
Nuclear doesnt need to ramp up and down. Just run them full tilt for baseline loads. Power use peaks during the day, when solar is most effective. Leave some extra unused nuclear capacity to pick up the slack when renewables cant meet demand, such as during winter storms. And then add batteries to smooth out the loads.
There are too many if-s in there. When you build energy strategy for at a country level, you can't base it on if-s. And even if we had viable battery technology today, there are still problems building them at scale, their cost and their volume. As of today, the more renewables you have, more expensive stable energy gets or you simply burn coal or gas when required.
There's only ifs because powerful forces (that do not represent the will of humanity) do everything they can to suppress or derail renewable energy efforts and divert our collective focus to war and conflict.
China is proving sodium-ion batteries are viable. Sodium is abundant and the batteries seem cheap to produce. Solar panels are also cheap to produce.
Instead of economic war or other forms of conflict, we could cooperate on these technologies and move forward as a species.
It's all very easy when you realize that war and conflict are not in anyone's best interest, with consequences that could spell the end of our planet's habitability, and could cause death and suffering that make previous World Wars look like child's play.
We already know fossil fuels are undesirable for the planet and we've already had plenty of nuclear disasters.
Let's worry about expanding nuclear technologies when we achieve fusion and the world achieves stability.
If you start a nuclear project today, you'll get it in 20 years. And that's for conventional reactor designs with all their well known flaws. If you spend the same money on renewables and storage, you'll have it all up and running next year. We don't have 20 years. We need solutions now.
This isn't even remotely true. Japan builds nuclear reactor in average of 5 years.
Edit for the down vote brigade:
80% or all nuclear reactors go from official planning to commercial production in under 10 years.
The longest process in building a nuclear reactor is cutting through red tape and getting permits cause of all the NIMBY and idiots progating mytha and lies about nuclear that originate in fossil fuels lobby.
Nuclear is the most ecologically friendly and safe power generation source we have until industrial scale fusion gets hammered out.
I wouldn't trust the Trump administration with building a styrofoam model of a nuclear reactor.
How many nuclear reactors did Japan build in the past five years? Ten years? Twenty years? Thirty years?
This comment sounds incredibly naive and yet smug at the same time. It’s this same confident stupidity that has led us here in the first place.
Again, what energy storage are you taking about? See my other reply about it. But perhaps a combination of both might be feasible. And you're right, we're late in any case, some countries even stupidly so by closing nuclear power plants for populist reason.
The German nuclear plants were closed because they were obsolete and nobody wanted to take responsibility for running them way past their design life. You can spread the same tired old myth all you want, that doesn't make it any more true.
Nuclear power plants get extended lifetime if there is will.
Also
Big win ... for the global warming.
German nuclear plants were closed because propaganda. They then demolished a wind turbine park to expand a coal mine to make up for the lost nuclear power.
Your comment is pure propaganda.
The German nuclear plants were 13 years overdue for their costly post-Fukushima checkups (as laws were tightened after Fukushima) and they were also past design life. Germany does not have a final storage solution for its legacy of nuclear waste, so the question of where to store the hazardous waste for multiple 100k years remains completely unsolved, and that in a fairly small but populous country that has no equivalent to the Nevada desert.
The energy that the final few plants generated was more than replaced by renewable build-out within the same year. In fact, at the height of German nuclear in the mid-90s, nuclear produced 30% of electricity, whereas renewables now produce 60% of German electricity. The reactors also evaporated used tons of river water, which is bad, given climate change. The reactors also tied Germany to a Russian-dominated supply chain, also bad, given geopolitical circumstances.
German coal usage is now the lowest since the 60s; while granted, Germany is behind a number of countries in that respect that have phased out coal entirely. And while yes, a wind park was demolished to enlarge a coal mine, and that is a terrible symbol, it is not much more than that.
https://euobserver.com/green-economy/arf0893c11
This was not even two years ago. Germany killed old plants yes but stopped construction for new ones. Which resulted in an energy deficit compounded by a desire to move away from Russian gas, hence turbines being ripped out to expand coal.
I have no idea where you're getting "100k years of waste" from, that's completely nonsense. Everything else about your comment even more so.
Cool, you have an agenda to push.👍
I acknowledged that a wind park was dismantled, please read my comment. And it's interesting to know that you just wipe away everything else as "nonsense", without any argument.
The only agenda I have to push is making sure our grandchildren have a future that isn't a collapse to pre-industrial living if not total extinction. Nuclear is very much a leg of that future as much as renewables like wind and solar, but hydro needs to go for the massive damage it caused ecological systems. If that's something you're against then I don't understand what horse you have in the energy race.
The rate of expansion and energy production, we need nuclear for base loads just as much as we need wind for flex loads. Every other solution is a delusional, a disservice or outright submission to corporate greed that got us in this mess to begin with.
In that case, please stop flogging fission. It's a dead horse, albeit one that continues shitting radiation for multiple 100k years.
There you go again with that 100k years number which is a made up number. Fissile products from reactors decay in under 100 years. The only stays radioactive that long is plutonium. Which is not a fissile product or spent fuel.
Batteries, especially in China, but within western techfacturing grasp, are mature and abundant and priced well. Solar plus batteries can outcompete even new fossil fuel builds.
We could say the same about nuclear power:
EDF cuts nuclear production in reaction to soaring temperatures
Sure, they are not perfect. But newer ones are much more resilient to droughts. And such droughts are not that common, also while they affected power output it's not by that much - if I recall it was something in line with 10%.
No, we have viable energy storage solutions already. We haven't built them out, but they are already feasible. And the best part about them is that they get more feasible each year, while nuclear becomes less and less feasible each year.
Assuming that you start today, by the time the first nuclear plant comes online, it will be so wildly uncompetitive that only huge amounts of subsidies will be able to keep it running.
Closing down existing nuclear was a mistake, and there's probably an argument to be made that scaling back on its construction and R&D was also a mistake. But trying to go back to nuclear at this point when renewables and storage are so obviously taking over is a larger mistake.
What viable solution we have for i.e. a week worth of energy in worst case scenario? Let's take Slovenia for example with yearly consumption of 12.95 TWh, a week worth of energy would be 248 GWh. And during winter this number is probably higher. How would you store it? Note that US consumption is twice as high and population is x150.
A scenario where you get zero production for a week is very unlikely - broadly speaking, you cope with this by building out production to produce a massive surplus, with various industries that can at variable rates use up the massive amounts of cheap power in the base case, then you build up storage to cope with the most likely scenarios of capacity reduction/smoothing out the price curve throughout the day.
It's also important to note that demand is far from static - people can and will reduce their usage when incentivized to do so, usually in the form of raising prices in low capacity scenarios. It's already starting to become quite popular to do so today, with spot price electricity plans allowing people to pay ridiculously low rates by aligning their energy usage with capacity availability - things like charging EVs/running laundry/running dishwashers/storing up thermal energy.
That's why I wrote "worst case". Imagine a winter rainy week with short days when heat pumps are running like crazy. But again, I have yet to see real energy storage solutions or real such scenarios.
This sounds like quite a rube goldberg machine to avoid simply supplying a predictable baseline with nuclear. If you try to out-surplus increasingly common climate catastrophes, you're going to be in for a rude awakening.
Any surplus or pricing plan will be gamed by power hungry datacenters or other wasteful capitalist scam-de-jour. Like you said, demand is elastic so any spare watt will eventually be sucked up as the price curve is optimized. The combined fluctuations on supply+demand is not what you want for a stable grid.
I predict a scenario where storage has to shore up that instability; much more storage than people think. The potential for a zero-supply floor (independent of demand growth) with massive surplus peaks requires building out an equally massive buffer. What will that ecological damage will look like? Will our current projections and efficiencies hold true at that scale?
The cheap energy -> increased demand -> increased storage -> more surplus cycle will cement our reliance on cheap energy, which requires more stability which means more storage, etc...
Let me clarify here that renewables are important for planning a responsible energy future, but only chasing cheap energy isn't the solution. It's not possible for us to out-produce the over-consumption that got us here.
In what way does nuclear get less feasible? It's the safest form of power per kw even when you weigh down the stats with crap like Chernobyl that never would have left drawing paper in the west, and uses the least amount of land so that low carbon footprint means something where we aren't tearing down trees as power demands expand.
Their cost goes up over time while the cost of both renewables and energy storage is plummeting.
The cost goes up entirely due to red tape and lobbying from fossil fuel organizations. Remove the boot that is nuclear fear induced largely by oil companies and actually commit to nuclear R&D and the cost will drop. And even the recent breakthroughs China made with Thorium made are genuine, even more so. And unlike every other power generation industry, nuclear operators are mandated by law to put aside funding to handle waste. Tell me which solar industry members are doing anything about PFAS generated in their production or wind turbine operators who give a damn about how many landfills they are flooding with expired turbine blades.
Nuclear is needed for the AI tech industry. He doesn't give a fuck what the people need. These are pushes from META, Google, Amazon and Open-AI. But guess who is gonna pay.
AI needs large amounts of cheap power. Nuclear does not deliver on those requirements - vast quantities of renewables would be far more suitable for this purpose. However, renewables are woke and as such Trump would never lean into them, no matter how profitable it would be.