Nuclear costs are largely due to regulatory burdens created for reactor designs that are not safe. That is no longer the case. Also, attempts to exploit economies of scale could also improve baseline costs, although these attempts haven't been funded enough yet to actually scale.
Can you cite any stats to back up the claim that nuclear is cheaper than solar or wind in any country, any of them, that's not over 4 years old?
The price of solar and battery storage has collapsed. It's really dramatic
This is a log scale https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=earl...
Battery storage would need another 100x improvement before being usable for such usage.
Maybe it will reach that point, maybe not but anyways, you can't plan a grid on non-existing tech. Otherwise I'd pick some better non-existing one
What kind of usage? Batteries are already being built and deployed at scale to support renewables.
Enough batteries to last with no nuclear, coal, or natural gas on a still winter night? There are not enough grid scale batteries yet. There’s ~8 hours of daylight at the 45th parallel in December.
I don’t feel like doing napkin math on Saturday morning, but you’d need an obscene amount of batteries, the US uses 500+ GWh per day.
Ideally battery storage density will keep advancing to the point where we can use grid scale backup batteries for long durations but we are not there yet.
A typical car battery stores 60 kWh (the average capacity of models is increasing), so, charged during the day using inexpensive renewable electricity (particularly solar), it can power a household during one of the rare winter nights with insufficient wind.
Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.
Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).
In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.
OK, so the answer to my question is “No”.
You can safely ignore all the households, they barely use any power compared to commercial and industrial facilities. What is the office tower going to do, use backup batteries from 500 cars in the basement to run dozens of pumps and fans? That doesn’t even get into industrial electrical loads..
Supplying 30% of California’s power is not 100% backup of the grid with batteries, sorry. Neither is “Let’s use cars to back up houses,” which ignores the fact that most power demand is non-residential.
We are a ridiculously long ways away from an exclusively solar + wind + batteries grid.
> OK, so the answer to my question is “No”.
So what? Something which hasn't been done yet must not be attempted? Or is it doomed to fail?
The transition of many electrical systems is a work-in-progress. A complete re-haul of such heavy industry branch cannot be quickly completed, especially during a global crisis.
> You can safely ignore all the households, they barely use any power compared to commercial and industrial facilities.
Nope.
USA: Residential customers (139.894 million) directly consumed 1,509.23 TWh, or 35.23% of the total.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
> What is the office tower going to do, use backup batteries from 500 cars in the basement to run dozens of pumps and fans?
A continental mix of renewables can cope most of the time. The point is the 'backup' (when a geographical zone doesn't produce enough and cannot be helped by another zone): dams, batteries, green hydrogen...
> Supplying 30% of California’s power is not 100% backup of the grid with batteries
This is a work-in-progress. 15 years ago some said that renewables will never be able to generate more than a few percent of the current running on national grid.
> We are a ridiculously long ways away from an exclusively solar + wind + batteries grid.
To each is own opinion.
Production trend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
No they aren't, there's no country on earth which can sustain a winter load with batteries.
In the next years, it doesn't make sense to use batteries to sustain winter load: it would be way too expensive. But batteries get cheaper quickly, such that it doesn't make sense to build expensive nuclear plants just for winter. What does make sense, until batteries are cheap enough, is natural gas during winter, plus (where available) wind energy and hydro / pumped storage, existing nuclear plants (optimised for winter), biomass (wood), photovoltaics in the mountain, and geothermal.
There is no country on earth which has spent anything like as much on developing storage as it has on fragile, unreliable, expensive nuclear plants.
Systems like these are just getting started.
https://stateofgreen.com/en/solutions/storing-heat-for-a-col...
> fragile, unreliable, expensive nuclear plants.
Nuclear is currently expensive, but you're 100% wrong on those other two. Also, more people die from installing and maintaining solar and wind turbines than have ever died from nuclear, so...
Yeah sure, it's right around the corner, I had the same conversation on HN 3 years ago haha.
Say what you want about nuclear plants but they work, right now and we have example of countries successfully creating a grid with it.
I can't say the same about the magical batteries.
Exponential growth is a funny thing. First it looks like nothing is happening, and all of a sudden everything has changed. Check out discussions about wind and solar some 10 years ago.
E: for reference from memory, it took about 50 years to install the first TW of solar. The next TW took 2 years, and the next TW is projected to take only 1 year, 2025.
For now it looks more like a flat curve than an exponential one. Batteries haven't followed PV at all, especially not for a grid scale usage.
Making batteries viable for home use is a very different story to make them viable for a grid.
> Making batteries viable for home use is a very different story to make them viable for a grid.
True. But both are stories from the same book. Meaning: If more homes install batteries and some become fully off-grid you will stabilize the whole grid without needing to install more power generation. This is exactly what happened in Pakistan (src: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/08/pakistan-energy-affo...) and I expect will happen all over the world as:
1. PV+battery prices continue falling
2. Climate change resulting in more sunny days (one of the very few upsides)
3. The need to become more self-sufficient due to energy price volatility due to shitty govt/shitty grid/shitty neighbors attacking your neighbors
Would be nice to see some subsidy from the govt (is EU listening?) like: "here's low interest loan to take your home off grid payable over 20+ years (expected lifetime of the whole PV+bat system) during which you promise you won't connect to grid".
So show me the model of renewables + batteries that would have been sufficient for all of the last 75 years in Germany and the UK. We do have the historical weather data so there is ZERO reason for all that handwaving.
Simulated wind-water-solar-battery in one of Australia grid is pretty close:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr...
so the 3.2GWh battery grid storage array, in operation, this is still 1/100th what is needed?
https://www.energy-storage.news/edwards-sanborn-california-s...
You want a 320 GWh installation?
You do realize HVDC grids can do 3,000km energy travel, right? That's basically anywhere to anywhere, continental US. There's already installs like the PDCI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie that take 3GW from north oregon to LA.
There's even transcontinental energy links in the works like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
> so the 3.2GWh battery grid storage array, in operation, this is still 1/100th what is needed?
That's closer to 1% of what California needs by itself then even 1% of the USA's need. We aren't even taking into account the large and continual growth in electricity demand yet either.
Together with a large and continual growth of battery electric vehicules.
> so the 3.2GWh battery grid storage array, in operation, this is still 1/100th what is needed?
Unless I'm mistaken, the US consumption is 500GWh/day with peaks at 700GW/day, so 3GWh isn't going to do much
"This technology that is starting to emerge is garbage because it's not already everywhere"?
... and so we're back to my first comment, a 100x improvement is still needed for this kind of usage.
3GWh isn't even at a proof of concept stage yet for this kind of usage. Even 10x that would barely be called a POC.
Nuclear costs would be way higher if the plant operators would need to have insurance for catastrophic failures. Right now, they don't need that. The state (the population) just takes this risk.
Even ignoring all of that, there's "time to first watt" - essentially if you break ground now, how quickly can you start producing power? Nuclear has years scale, wind and solar has weeks, if not days.
And also when better tech comes along, you can partially transition a farm to newer panels and resell the old ones after market.
Plus you don't have to build Onkalo Repository like systems to store waste for 100,000 years after you've produced your electricity.
It's wildly more feasible.
"Years" is technically correct I guess - recent EPRs have taken 18 years from license to grid. Hinkley C 2012-2031 (projected). Flamanville 3 2006-2024. Olkiluoto 3 2005-2023. This is way too much latency. Every little bit helps of cours but it's hopeless optimism to think nuclear meaningfully helps the climate disaster for the foreseeable future.
I have this same issue with fusion. Who cares if the fuel is practically free, when building and operating the plant is extremely expensive and prone to failures due to the sheer complexity.
Of course the tech and science is cool, possibly useful in space or other niche environments, but whenever I see fusion proposed as some general energy solution, I just roll my eyes and move on.
People really love scifi on hn, and that's fine ... but the investment capital has spoken and renewables are being funded 30x nuclear. Not 30% more, 3,000% more. It's even 2x over ogc infra (oil, gas, coal)
https://knowledge.energyinst.org/new-energy-world/article?id...
It's a 12-1 over OGC in what the IEA labels "advanced economies" https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025
We'll have direct antimatter annihilation at scale before we have fusion. It's basically a physics research project, with zero potential for commercial use.
There's already a convenient fusion reactor fairly close by, and it's unlikely to stop operating any time soon.
> Even ignoring all of that, there's "time to first watt" - essentially if you break ground now, how quickly can you start producing power? Nuclear has years scale, wind and solar has weeks, if not days.
France and China have built nuclear plants in 6 years, and they provide stable power for over 40 years, unlike wind turbines and panels which last maybe 20 for panels (if you're lucky), and a few years for turbine failures, and neither provide stable power.
Renewables have their place but people really need to stop with this panacea nonsense.
Panels are warrantied for 25 or 30 years at a specific level of performance, with 30 year old installs still working today and 40 years is an expected lifetime for a modern panel before it will dip below that warranted level but still be producing energy with minimal upkeep.
Why do think the two countries you mention as being capable of quickly building nuclear are in fact much more quickly deploying renewables?
Panel damage happens from more than just the sun, eg. hail, sand/dust, wind, branches, etc. Warranty doesn't cover that.
> Why do think the two countries you mention as being capable of quickly building nuclear are in fact much more quickly deploying renewables?
Short-term political expediency is not an argument for technical superiority or fitness for purpose.
Nuclear operators do need insurance to cover incidents, so they're already paying that cost on top of the absurd regulatory burdens. Current gen nuclear designs are basically meltdown proof, so not only should insurance costs be lower, but regulatory burden should also be lower.
The liability is capped at a certain amount. In the US, that is around $450 million per reactor. They also have to buy in to a fond. In France, the cap is 700 million euro. Above that, the federal government _could_ step in. The problem is, no private insurer (or even pool of insurers) could cover the absolute worst-case GAU, and not even the government really.
In Fukushima, TEPCO was required pay $1.5 billion. But the real cost is / was around $150 billion. So, the bulk of the disaster was not covered / covered by the taxpayer. So: the public.
Right. If the only way a business is profitable is because the public has been convinced to pick up the tab, please excuse me for not being interested.
> the cap is 700 million euro
According to the French nuclear industry itself a major accident on one reactor may cost more than 430 billion euro (2013). Source (French): https://www.irsn.fr/savoir-comprendre/crise/cout-economique-...
Biz as usual... https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/accueil#h....
> Current gen nuclear designs are basically meltdown proof
Basically.