I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.
I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia.
That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.
> country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA
Are you serious when putting France in this list? Nuclear is such a cash cow here that EDF manage to make profits even while being forced by the regulator to sell a big fraction of its nuclear capacity below the operating cost and buying it back to them at market price! (We're talking about a multi-billon subsidies scheme, look for ARENH).
And that is despite (rather legitimate IMHO) regulatory constraints that have no equivalent in any other industry.
Yeah I’m really confused why France is in that list (also, less so, but China - they have come a great way, further than almost any western country save France, I’m just unsure I’d the metric here applies evenly).
I’ll stand by the only reason nuclear power is unprofitable (in most cases) is because we decide it is unprofitable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821997
Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
France doesn't have an answer for decommissioning costs.
technically speaking they don't have to be decomissioned and when they absolutely have to be I believe at that point we will have fusion which is only 10 years away.
Yes, France is pretty much alone in making nuclear work. It's impressive. That said, it is alone.
IE, I don't see other nations reproducing the French institutions and culture that allowed this. Will France itself even continue them?
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?
Nuclear has several major cost problems if it's own. Insuring against a major accident is prohibitively expensive, the kind of inspection+maintenance regime that's necessary for safety isn't amenable to cost reductions. The list goes on. Basically:
Nuclear isn't similar to the things that grow cheaper as the operators gain experience.
Much if fhe inspections and standards aren't "necessary for safety" but the direct product of paranoia and lobbying. Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
> Nuclear is brutally overregulated, far, far beyond what's necessary to ensure safety, and that's where most costs come from.
Is this really true? We seem to have a pretty large disaster perhaps every 15-20 years (3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), which makes me think that it is either correctly- or under- regulated. Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
> Of course coal and oil are worse, but that’s not exactly a high bar…
It is what we want to replace with nuclear power, so that's exactly the bar we should jump over. So let's say it: all of these disasters did not cause even 1/1000 as many deaths as coal power plants.
I agree coal power pants are much worse. As an aside, I’m not convinced that’s the bar we need to clear. I would think we need to be safer than solar power, since that’s the source that’s actually growing rapidly. If we’re going to add new power generation, I think it’s probably a trade off between nuclear and solar.
And anyways this isn’t the claim I was disagreeing with — the parent claim is that nuclear is regulated “beyond what's necessary to ensure safety”. I just don’t think that’s the case. As dramatic as it sounds, we regularly have nuclear disasters.
Then why is the insurance for every single reactor public sector based?
Possibly because if there's a big accident, everybody in the region who gets cancer will sue, even if there's no detectable change to cancer rates.
No,
The reason that constant inspections are need is because radiation weakens everything. Since nothing is immune, everything can break prematurely and so everything must be inspected.
Fukushima and Chornobyl happened directly for a lack of paranoia, regulation and lobbing. I hope that we don't commit the same mistake again.
Fukushima happened in a highly regulated (and correspondingly expensive) environment. Improving the regulation doesn't necessarily just mean adding more of it or tightening targets far beyond any useful range. Also, arguably the evacuations as a response to Fukushima caused more harm than the radiation would have, an example of paranoia as opposed to effective regulation.
(Chernobyl also happened because of paranoia but that was largely the Soviet's obsession with saving face to the point of hiding a design flaw from the operators).
Though, I will push back on the idea that this is exclusively why it's so expensive: Nuclear has plenty of other issues with cost beyond excessive safety targets.
The human impact of those is a fraction of fossil-fuels. So it’s not fair to judge nuclear for being expensive if we don’t hold other fuels to similarly rigorous standards
Are you saying that plutonium isn't nearly as poisonous as people claim, and watching for hairline cracks in containment walls is a waste of time?
Or something like that?
Not GP, but plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is.
Don't get me wrong, it's super deadly, but there are loads of toxins that are more deadly than plutonium. And while its radioactivity is seen as ultra scary, it's actually pretty nice, because you can at least detect it. Harder than beta or gamma, but still, it announces its presence.
How I wish I had a magic wand (spectrometer) that I could wave over my food to see if cyanide, ricin, mercury, or lead were there.
This. I wish people made a Geiger counter equivalent for pm2.5 and other atmospheric pollutants, people would never get to the subway again. And breathing air in any big Asian city is much more dangerous than doing the same in Prypiat.
It exists already.
Yeah, the problem is the overhyping of radiation's danger kind of covers-up the other problem, radiation weakens everything. Hairline cracks are a threat because the radiation is going to weaken the cement that's holding the very high pressure steam that's generating electricity.
Nuclear meltdowns have been common but dangerous radiation leaks rare and over-hyped, sure. But meltdowns involve an extraordinarily expensive piece of equipment irrevocably breaking and that is what has made nuclear power uneconomical, not environmentalists' hand wringing. Indeed, I'd suspect nuclear company executives love to say the environmentos killed things, much better than saying their operations weren't economical.
> plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is... it's super deadly
"Super deadly" sounds enough scary to me, thanks
There are things that are "super deadly premium" of course. Stupidity terrifies me more than Plutonium. Specially when both things come together, but in the end the result is not much different.
Yes, think about the US military budget.
I'd argue at least half of it basically functions as a petroleum subsidy.
And the other thing that people just simply do not understand is it's solar and wind are now cheaper than anything else, even if the subsidies are applied to them, and would be even more so if the trump tarrifs were eliminated.
The only justification in nuclear right now it's deglobalization and energy independence. But I would argue all the money you throw into nuclear for that, it's much better served simply building out solar and wind
Yeah, let's not forget defence budgets that are spent to prop up oil availability too.
War would be so much harder w/o oil, yet we fight wars for oil. Hmmm.
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.
He mixed some units there, mostly by translating Chinese costs into OECD/USA costs. China does indeed take 5 years to build a reactor. That's what happens when you build a couple a year for decades. After 20 years, that might be true in the OECD/USA too, but for now you are looking at over 10 years, $10B/GW, and over 8% interest.
None of that is the real issue though. The real issue is for at least 8 hours a day, but probably more like 16 hours a day, renewables can generate power at well under 1/2 the price of what he calculated. So they won't sell the 9 units of power he forecast - it will be at best 4.5 units, and the nuclear plant even at his optimistic assumptions never makes money.
If you look at South Australia [0] - they are at 80% renewables now. At 80%, the average wholesale is cheaper than what nuclear can supply. The percentage will go higher, probably to around 90%..95%. They are and will achieve that with very limited (ie, cheap) storage.
But obviously that isn't 100% - so it becomes a question of what can fill the gap of 60 days or so a year the cheapest. Nuclear has no hope. Generating and storing ammonia using excess renewables and burning it when needed is one of the most expensive forms of energy available - but if you only need to do it for 60 days a year, it is still far cheaper than nuclear, because nuclear's primary cost is it's interest bill, not fuel.
The good professor paints gas fuel cost as a disadvantage. But when you are only burning it 60 days a year, then compared to paying nuclear's interest bill 365 days a year it's cheap.
[0] https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/consumers/energy-grid-and...
Which should we expect will find more cost reductions in the next couple decades? Nuclear or battery storage?
Looked at it that way, I'm skeptical of all these new nuclear projects. No one has made SMRs work economically, yet we're seeing incredible improvements in batteries, and there's enough unexplored chemistry possibilities we don't have a reason to think we're near the end of the road on that.
This must at least partly be region-dependent right?
In the darker northern parts of Europe, the German transition to renewable haven't really been a cost-saving success story (right?).
From my (very) casual Swedish vantage point, the wind build out here was a very government subsided race to zero marginal prices that barely helped anything?
This really should be a top level comment. It accurately explains the broken economics of nuclear, and is the real reason effectively no nukes will be built going forward. Not the usual tired points about regulations and safety fears and Chernobyl or whatever
To be fair South Australia is:
* Incredibly sunny
* Incredibly sparely populated
* Functionally winterless
Like it's the perfect setup for solar.
Somewhere like Denmark, Japan, even the US Northeast does not have those.
Precisely. France built out its current nuclear fleet over decades. The first reactors were expensive, but then costs came down. Of course, then they stopped and are now trying to restart again with new reactor models. It's been expensive and it's not clear they'll start building en-mass again.
Some people have irrational exuberance around nuclear technologies, and the numbers in that overly long explanation are an example of that. $5B for 1GW of nuclear?! HAH!
There's a systematic bias among all energy professionals to both vastly underestimate the cost of building nuclear, and overestimate the cost of solar, wind, and storage.
Go back 5 or 10 years, look at the numbers projected, and it's just wild. I've never seen any other industry where there's such a mass hallucination among people that otherwise consider themselves "serious people."
Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.
Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...
The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.
Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.
And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.
It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.
I've seen "just slap a battery onto a steel mill to make it work with solar." So what? People on every side are saying dumb things. The required restructuring of the grid makes wind + storage + peaker plants + solar not so dominant as you picture it. Some countries can have it cheaper without nuclear, some can't.
Yes, thank you. Eroi ist the only thing which matters from a hard physics stand point.
That’s just not true.
An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
30 years is generally the guarantee for some minimum output so it's the floor too... could still be outputting 60-70% of original spec for 50 years
It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.
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.
Peak oil was supposed to have happened decades ago but current projections put it well past 2050. Demand for oil is going to fall due to electrification long before we run out of sufficient oil production capacity.
It is clear at this point that peak oil was another failed Malthusian projection. I don't think peak oil is guiding much national policy aside from the national security aspects.
Yes. There's all kind of hydrocarbons that aren't economic or barely so, like oil shale or shale oil, with is rock with a stain on it.
Interestingly, Venezuelan extra heavy sour crude oil is not profitable to use at $55 a barrel, the price before the Iran war, but is profitable when it's over $90 a barrel.
It's easy to make money when someone else pays the costs but you get to keep the revenue.
This is wrong. The peak of conventional oil is documented around 2007. Since then, Europe's economy has been slowing down (if you look at physical indicators like how much is transported by trucks or what surface is being built each year, not artificial ones like the GDP).
Global peak is estimated to be around now (a few years ago maybe?).
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.
Plenty of uranium available from Canada, Australia, and Namibia
FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too
has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it
Canadian reactors don't use enriched uranium. Also many countries have centrifuges - Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, and of course all the nuclear armed states. Further, enrichment plants can be built anywhere.
Even in Spain we have Uranium, but the politicians made it illegal to mine it, lol (I wanna cry)
Why? Isn’t it in the national interest of a government to preferentially use foreign sources of uranium to preserve domestic sources?
It should be in the national interest. But every nation is determined to let Russia have the last resources in 30 years by boycotting Russian oil and gas.
As we hear downthread though, we'll have warp drives by then.
there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision
Mining isn't a great argument against nuclear. Uranium fuel has an incredibly high energy density so a relatively small amount of high grade ore can be converted into a large amount of electricity so even when compared to the one time input from mining required to produce all of the components that go into making a PV installation it can still perform favourably. Uranium mining is also transitioning away from open pit mines to using in-situ recovery where a liquid solution is injected into a uranium ore formation to dissolve the uranium before recovering the solution, about 55% of current uranium production uses this method already.
Mining uranium in Spain would destroy environment and involve legal slavery?
Slavery is obviously not an issue in a country like Spain, but any kind of mining operation here seems to be heavily opposed by the people that live around the potential sites, for environmental reasons.
Nuclear fuel is available from lots of countries, including Canada and Australia, plus deposits in Europe that aren't being minted because uranium is very cheap.
Plus you can stockpile it super easy.
Wrong uranium you can easily stock for 10years inadvance
Maybe don't keep it all in one spot, though.
Nuclear power plants refuel on yearly cycles.
That's plenty of time to source alternative uranium supplies presuming you haven't stockpiled.
Plus: Australia has an absolute ton of the stuff.
This is false. Nuclear power plants are very profitable, if streamline the regulations that are choking them to death with bureaucracy and no safety.
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.
Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.
- https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nucl...
- https://www.techniques-ingenieur.fr/actualite/articles/epr-d...
> The reliability of french electricity
Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.
Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.
So many reactors off was a special event of delayed maintenance, things are done so that does not usually happens. And it's not true to say that Germany reactivated coal reactors for French lights.
Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.
That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable
Until the rivers run low.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...
> Nuclear plants along the Danube river in Hungary and Romania were forced to cut output this week and could be shut down completely in the coming days due to record low water levels.
You know when rivers run not-low? In winter when we need to heat all those freezing homes. Crazy how that works. Yup, it's not ideal in a summer heat wave... but that's precisely when solar can shine.
We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.
> We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.
"Solar and nuclear are the only two options" is a false dichotomy, lol.
>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.
I am generally of the opinion that nuclear power is not justified on the basis of base economics.
But I thought South Korea made a good swing at it, but I haven't kept up on things much
why is profit the right descriptor?
wouldnt you instead count the net benefits to the whole economy from having that cheap and plentiful electricity?
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?
Power is an input. If it isn’t profitable it needs to be subsidized from elsewhere.
Healthcare is the same. It just turns out subsidizing it from wages works because healthy people are more productive.
Profitability isn’t a hard limit. But if something isn’t internally profitable, it requires an external partner to get going.
Because for power creation there are alternatives, but for healthcare there aren't. Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue. Ideally we could use land currently dedicated to energy crops to install solar panels that operate at a significantly higher efficiency.
Many countries do not have the raw materials to build solar, wind turbines, and batteries so it doesn't solve the sovereignty issue.
That's like saying oil-producing countries aren't sovereign unless they also manufacture oil drills and pumps and pipes and tanks.
The sun is an oil well. Panels are drills or pumps. Batteries are oil tanks.
Not having oil drill and oil tank factories in your country isn't a critical energy sovereignty issue.
They don't need to make things themselves, they just need to have the capability to make it themselves to be sovereign.
If you get cut off from global oil trade while having oil in the ground but no ability to make drills, what use is the oil? If you want sovereignty then it is critical to have the ability to make drills, tankers, etc in your country if you rely on oil.
This is no different than solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc when it comes to renewables. If you don't care about sovereignty then great, you are good to go. If you do, then you need to be able to handle everything yourself otherwise you are always going to be reliant on other countries.
Once you have a solar panel you can't be cut off from using it. It's not like oil where you need regular deliveries forever.
Sure, but when your existing ones break or you need more you can have issues.
> when your existing ones break
They last 25 years. Enough time to spin up domestic manufacturing if you're really paranoid.
> or you need more
Lots of countries manufacture them today.
I'm not talking about manufacturing. I am talking about raw materials for chips, battery cells, etc. You can't be sovereign if you have the capability to build something but don't have the resources to build it
If your electricity usage isn't growing like crazy, existing batteries can simply be recycled to make new ones.
What chips are you talking about?
Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
> What chips are you talking about?
Electronic chips in wind turbines, hydro stations, etc.. Believe it or not but all of these use chips...
> Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
I am not holding renewables to it. The person I was responding to made the erroneous claim that you would be sovereign with renewables. "Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue." I am just pointing out that most countries wouldn't actually have sovereignty and would still be reliant on other countries.
I am the one holding the consistent standard since I believe most countries wouldn't be sovereign regardless of them using fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
An awful lot more countries in the world have the potential to sovereign manufacture relatively simple renewables than the massive engineering in reactors
I am not talking about manufacturing but the resources necessary to build them.
But they have the resources to build nuke plants?
I don’t understand the point
Because for healthcare profit isn't a motive to begin with (or at least, it shouldn't be) and there aren't many different alternative sources for it either.
Neither it is for nuclear. It fixes the externality
Healthcare is profitable like schools are, or roads, or public transportation, or sanitary systems: the goal is for us a society to live better.
When something is profitable in the sense that a few oligarchs make more an more money, I see it as a bug, not a feature.
And in a society that hasn’t made health care profitable (Italy), I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
I literally would’ve been better off flying to New York. I still have scars and nerve damage from the incredibly poor care in Italy’s medical system.
In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance and seen immediately after a car hit me while I was bicycling — and that was just because they were worried about the speed at which the accident occurred. They had me patched up within the hour. I was fine, road rash and sore for a couple weeks.
There’s no silver bullet here, but I’m very sure that healthcare is not a good analogy for nuclear power.
I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries. I hope you enjoy waiting and long-term adverse health effects from poor, delayed, and inaccessible care.
I had an non urgent injury in Spain last week. Went to A&E and was seen by a doctor, x-rayed, and given advice and the results within 90 minutes. I paid zero euros for that on top of my taxes. Maybe it's an Italian problem... And for sure Spain has its own issues as well, but private is not always necessarily better.
I've lived in Spain a couple years ago. I've seen the quality of its health care. Its easily 20 years behind the US and that's being charitable. The family that lived next to me had a man who had the exact same break I had had 20 years before. He had worse, more primitive care than I did in the US decades before. I had to explain to them why it was a bad idea for him to sit in his wheelchair all day because nobody in the Spanish system seemed to know how to care for a simple broken leg. You got what you paid for...
PS Spanish taxes are absurdly high...insurance in the US is still cheaper than the difference in taxes between the two countries. All that and an actual working economy and energy system.
Sometimes it works — but the overall quality, speed, and care outcomes remain, on average, very poor when compared to the US.
The price is only good if you ignore the outcomes and what you’re paying on the backend through taxes.
>I’m also very sure that anyone that advocates for government healthcare should try actually using it in one of these countries
I actually do since I'm Italian lol
Don't get me wrong, what has happened to you feels at best a bad practice, at worst something that goes on the news or that has a legal proceeding afterwards. I've known people with good and bad experiences, I can't complain too much about it. Can I ask in which region? Italian Healthcare is somewhat region-dependant
Uhhh, some nerve damage, news worthy? Ho qualche dubbio al riguardo.
Fellow italian here, let's not act like our third rate ERs never leave people suffering for hours without caring that it may have lasting consequences. I understand it's partially due to understaffing, but this is the reality. My dad had this happen to him as well. Thanks
This was at the Ospedale San Carlo di Nancy in Rome.
Understood, never had to deal with healthcare in Lazio region
> I waited 12 hours, literally on the floor, with a broken arm and covered in my own blood, before I was seen after a motorcycle accident.
So literally just a broken limb. Non-life threatening, can wait. Sorry, triage is a bitch. Some patients will literally die within minutes/hours if not actively treated. Go figure.
> In the US, I was rushed into the ER in an ambulance
The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
A broken limb, fractured elbow, deep cuts/lacerations/abrasions on my legs, elbow, and arms. I was in pain, my wounds were filled with gravel and dirt, and I just closed my eyes and laid on the floor and disassociated for twelve fucking hours. My girlfriend was losing her shit trying to advocate for me.
Subjectively applied, uncaring triage that leaves people poorly cared for is exactly what happens when you lack sufficient capacity, aren’t paying your staff enough to care, and staff's incentives aren’t sufficiently tied to their outcomes.
My father, an ER doctor in the US, was losing his shit over their quality of care when I FaceTimed him afterwards.
Your lack of compassion is also exactly what produces these kinds of systems. Who cares about the actual outcomes or the affected individuals, as long as your ideological ideals aren’t challenged.
> The second they dispatch an ambulance, you owe them how much exactly these days? $5000?
My insurance covered all of it. The driver’s insurance reimbursed my own.
And even if they hadn’t, I’d rather be in the hole financially than spend 12 hours in pain and have persistent issues caused by free health care doing a hack job putting me back together.
The US healthcare system isn’t perfect, but I’ve got at least another four decades left on this planet, and the cost of US healthcare is nothing compared to the cost of living out those decades in a body that’s not as healthy as possible.
> I’d rather be in the hole financially
You don't have the slightest clue what it means to be poor and in a financial hole. Like, it's impossible to explain to you.
[dead]
Count me in. I'd rather be poor in the worst neighborhood (or village) in Nigeria but healthy than in a European mansion and unhealthy. Feel free to tell me all about how I can't understand, champion of the proletariat.
You lost any credibility with the $5000 comment. You have no idea how the american system works and I'm not even american. Your snarky tone is absolutely disgusting, I would love for you to receive the same answer when talking about some health issue caused by terrible healthcare.
Terminally online people like you who lose all empathy when something they believe in is criticized are very funny and sad at the same time.
I am not sure what you mean by profitable here?
Yes, while we’re looking at expenses, add the military to oil.
What exactly does it mean for a powerplan in china or russia to be profitable?
The same thing it means anywhere else?
Any argument that environmentalists run amok is the sole cause of nuclear's failure to launch has to address the fact that these two places, where environmentalists are a lot more likely to get a club to the head than a say at the table, are largely not expanding their nuclear power that much versus, say, solar in China.
This is wrong, Germanies Konvoi where immensely profitable. The greens complained about these as money printing machines.
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.
China has some coal reserves but overall they're a major net fossil fuel importer. They're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk which is why they've been rapidly electrifying their economy and building solar, nuclear, and hydro power plants (along with coal fired power plants).
They’ve been building out every form of power generation they can. Nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. It’s all skyrocketing.
The talking point that they’re going green doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-producti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
That link is out of date. China's coal share fell under 50% this year (your link says 58%), and their CO2 emissions dropped 1% the first half of 2026.
So yes, it can be reasonably claimed that China is greening. "greening", not "green" -- 49.7% coal is still a lot of CO2.
https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/china-pushes-coal-...
Maybe emissions fell because industrial activity fell instead? Maybe oil and gas have been used less because the cost has risen. Maybe that explains coal as well depending on how it is used. I’m speculating coal might be used in the production of steel - what if that product is highly tariffed in the US and EU so China had to cut back?
China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal. If it was they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
> China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal
Why does the "why" matter? Tons of carbon are tons of carbon, right? That's what people say when you tell them about per-capita emissions.
> they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.
You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled.
What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
> Why does the "why" matter?
Well it doesn’t entirely matter but we should just acknowledge that it’s a geopolitical strategy and not really something they are doing for the planet.
> You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled. What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.
Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports for example due to alleged “dual use” as they continue to apply military pressure on democratic Taiwan? I’d encourage you to read up on these restrictions with respect to Japan for example who is alarmed by Chinese and North Korean provocations.
You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels. For some these tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies. It’s not just the US, by the way. The EU is tariffing China too.
They are entitled to pursue these strategies but we are also entitled in the west to recognize them and combat them how we see fit.
Oh you're correct, the same thing is happening in India without any of the nonsense fanfare.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/span-...
You can see the same dips hit at the same time for the same reason.
In terms of Chinese coal though there's a reason boosters always talk about percentages and not absolute number... one goes down, but the other keeps rising. Even if China continues on the current course in terms of tonnage burned they won't reach "peak coal" until at least 2030.
To add to this, China’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have been flat or declining for a couple of years now: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
Your own link says the following:
> After the first three quarters of the year, China’s CO2 emissions in 2025 are now finely balanced between a small fall or rise, depending on what happens in the last quarter.
And then goes on to describe how the largest drop (3%) is happening at a time when it just happens that fuel is increasingly expensive and scarce, shipping is increasingly expensive and slow, and the global economy has spent months grinding increasingly towards a terrible outcome.
People might as well brag about their incredible weight loss journey through amputation.
Fossil is flat or declining. Everything else is skyrocketing.
I never claimed that China is "going green" (whatever that means), merely that they're gradually reducing their dependence on imported fossil fuels.
China can be going green while also refusing to constrain it's economic growth on the short term.
When you actually build things, throwing up a coal plant for 10 years because you need it while you grow your solar and battery industries or wait for reactors to cover your base load is just sensible.
All narratives about China always have this static world baked into them: "they're currently like this, and that's all they'll ever be". But China develops fast. Shenzhen was a farming village by a ditch. 10 years ago buying a Chinese car was inconceivable - I took delivery on one yesterday, etc.
At some point in the very near future China is going to hit a cross over point on their emissions and they'll start falling fast because reactors + renewables will be building out fast enough they'll want the coal plants gone - no one likes ruling over a polluted wasteland.
Edit: it can also be the case that they don't care at all about going green...but renewable energy technology is the most sovereign possible energy security. No one can take away your access to the sun.
China also? How is that? China is a big importer of oil, and is heavily burning coal (more than 50% their energy mix), that is also partly imported. They are fighting for a cleaner energy not because they are green but because they don't want to be dependent on imports, and some people even accuse them of undercutting solar panel pricing to get all the world market.
They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being built is in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia, Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power.
You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.
Coal's share of electricity production in China fell below 50% in 2026 for the first time ever. This is despite idling nat gas plants due to the war in Iran messing up shipments.
Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.
If china that is the number one producer of solar panels and batteries is investing in nuclear perhaps that shows that indeed it's not such a bad bet? Specially taking into account the military applications of such capabilities.
It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?)
It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?
People who know how much effort it takes to constantly measure and contain radioactivity and what a mess it is to mine for Uranium in the first place also don't wonder.
If not, reading a list of this helps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
But sure, oil leaks can be bad as well. Solar leaks on the other hand seem bearable.
I believe burning coal realease far more Uranium and radioactive material than nuclear ever did. Listing the plane crashes over the last century wont buldge the statistics of the safety of this mean of transportation.
Did I imply anywhere anyhow that I am a fan of coal?
I just don't think it is a good idea to replace something dirty with something else dirty that is indeed quite safe if all goes well, but is horrible if something goes wrong.
Italy has lot's of sun and wind (and geothermal potential).
Everything is a comparison to what exists, not your dreams. The alternative to coal today isn't just renewables, and thinking in those absolute terms is in large part what's handed the fossil fuel lobby decades of default victories.
We don't have time for perfect solution, do all of what you said AND THEN ALSO MORE.
"We don't have time for perfect solution"
Exactly. You can buy and deploy solar, wind and batteries as much as you want now. If you care about strategic independence, build factories for them.
But a nuclear reactor takes a long time to get build. And is likely way more expensive. If italy manages to do it fast and cheap - other countries will follow, but I believe it when I see it.
I am someone who knows, hence my disgust. Time to learn about the radioactivity of coal fly ash and how carefully that’s managed.
Oh, I know and am in favor of shutting coal down asap and before nuclear. But you seem to imply handling radioactivity is not a big problem compared to fossils, but I believe it is, considering how faulty and corrupt individual humans are, or corporations or government bodies doing the oversight.
Off topic, but this guy on youtube is a knowledgeable (pro-nuke) resource.
https://www.youtube.com/@tfolsenuclear
Why does electricity need to be profitable? Are roads, justice systems, or armies profitable?
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.
They are not profitable. They add taxes to gas so that it pays for it.
Sure, but then that's not "profitable" in the direct sense of "makes rich oligarchs richer".
I'm all for improving the quality of life for society. In the end the goal is to live well, not to destroy our living conditions for a few oligarchs to make more money. But "profitability" is not generally optimised like this, unfortunately.
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.
I think that for your analogy to work, you also need to consider the total economic value that we get out of electricity as opposed to just revenue from electricity bills...?
> 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.
There is more than money. There is stability (not depending on foreign oil, peak oil, etc), there is climate change, etc.
Notice how for roads you compare the total economic value of all roads against the cost of them. But for electricity you compare a single power generation system. You are not comparing the same thing. A fair comparison would be the total economic value of having electricity against the cost of all electricity infrastructure. Sadly this fair comparison is irrelevant in this thread.
If every government had subsidized and pushed forward a transition to ~100% nuclear power back in the 70s it would have effectively solved climate change. Electricity, industry and heat production account for >50% of CO2 production.
Then there's all the other effects of not having a high demand for hydrocarbons including less Middle East entanglement, less mining and drilling, more abundant and cheaper oil for uses other than burning it, etc.
It does not. But there are so many sources that can be. And easily at that. So why go this route?
A lot of countries consider energy security national security, and national security always bats last.
A lot of countries also use it to help subsidize (or help cover up the costs of) their military nuclear programs.
That's just not true. Event is PWR reactors take their root in the nuclear program for plutonium generation, that's not the case anymore.
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.
Emissions.
Batteries and solar and wind are a lot cheaper, faster to deploy, and scale a ton better.
Nuclear is far too slow to solve our emissions problems, there's no chance of us being able to scale the nuclear industry to be able to confront climate change on the time scale necessary.
In contrast, batteries, solar, and wind are scaling on their own, without the massive government subsidies that would be needed to deliver nuclear too late to help.
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.
So the alternative is relying on solar panels made by a quasi-hostile country, because for some reason we can't produce them economically ourselves, or continuing to burn fossil fuels?
Countries just can pretty easily make solar economically themselves, it’s no great secret. But they don’t because china makes them a bit cheaper , you keep them forever and we’re not in a war. You think all the billions of parts and steel in a nuke will all be locally built too? For eg Go look up who owns almost all the foundries in the world that are required to build large pressure vessels for reactors.
So, option a sounds great to me, but you clearly have some kind of agenda here, that maybe you could make clearer
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.
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!
Also, dealing with the nuclear waste can be problematic. Even if you recycle it like France, it still costs to re-enrich it and still produces waste itself.
Are fossil fuels net profitable after subsidies, wars, and externalities are considered?
Oh boy, they are sooooo profitable that there are wars around them.
That's why I think lifters are really the only true path to cost reasonable nuclear power... They "burn" almost all fuel and have separation procedures for the other fission products, and I believe they can consume nuclear waste since it's a breeder reactor.
We’re at the point now where this has to be a problem for the future.
Treat power plants as public infrastructure. No need for high returns or insurance of every risk.
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.
Do you mean nuclear isn't profitable compared to coal, whose costs are externalized, or compared to other renewables?
In most sunny places a decentralized per-home solar policy is cheap, sustainable, and more robust to severe local weather events.
While fission reactors are still the cheaper initial energy choice (like a future cancer patients love of cheap cigarettes.) Small Modular reactors are a fools errand for most places, as they have all the same security, labor, and maintenance issues of full sized installations. Thus, instead of repairing one of four turbines every few years, the contaminated components must now be reprocessed or safely hidden away on mass.
Maybe fine for submarines or aircraft carriers, but for massive infrastructure it is trivial to prove it causes major long-term problems.
Anyone that has ever purchased a property with an old leaky heating-oil tank nasty surprise site-reclamation cost... will understand the initial unit price never covers the actual clean up cost. =3
They didn't because the taxpayers will finance that and no politician would be able to sell this.
Yes, it is part of Trump's tariff deals forced on e.g. Japan:
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/us-japan-in-smr-deal/
Italy should be buying proven French technology instead.
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.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Look up Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, it was 14 years late and (depending on whose figures you believe) cost nearly 10x more than the original estimate of €3 billion, bankrupting Areva in the process.
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