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If there's one thing that you should compromise on when it comes to nuclear power it's definitely safety.
Hey good news everyone, instead of 40 years to build a new reactor, it’ll only take 39 years. What a relief. Good thing we didn’t fall for all that free sunlight and wind bullshit!
Hey, maybe nuclear plants can run on clean coal!
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Storage is the solution, which we can build today in a viable way and is rapidly becoming cheaper and cheaper.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
Three days later then-Chancellor Angela Merkel – a physicist who was previously pro-nuclear – made a speech called it an “inconceivable catastrophe for Japan” and a “turning point” for the world. She announced Germany would accelerate a nuclear phase-out, with older plants shuttered immediately.
More than 30% of Germany’s energy comes from coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels – and the government has made controversial decisions to turn to coal to help with energy security. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/15/europe/germany-nuclear-phase-out-climate-intl/
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.
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but only as long as they output power.
We could say the same about nuclear power:
EDF cuts nuclear production in reaction to soaring temperatures
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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.
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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.
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great idea, nothing wrong will come from pressuring the nuclear power regulators. nuh uh.
It really depends on what these reactors are going to be used for. Are they going to be licensed to private corporations to power data centers, or are they going to provide power to citizens homes?
Individually alot of his ideas could be good, with proper care and planning. Instead he does them all at once without any sort of considerations, its wild to witness this train wreck.
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I am sure making consideration of climate change impacts illegal during the approval process won't have adverse consequences. When the water used to cool the reactor dries up, we'll have plenty of money and foresight to just pump it in from somewhere else, right?
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We need to work on permitting of New plants. Not new construction of Old plants.
But I get it, Don likes towers.
Soviet quality nuclear plants. Great idea. What could possibly go wrong?
I seem to remember something going wrong before when corners were cut with nuclear...
If the nuclear industry is going to be quadrupled, and gas and oil are similarly enlarged, and renewables are at least not shrinking, what are people supposed to do with all that extra power in such a short time? I mean, I get that induced demand is a thing but... a quadrupling of long-standing industries? Is there any intention for this plan to be realistic?
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this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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