Wow when nuclear power was the answer why we’re against it, but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables plus solar they are for it.
How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
Nuclear power is not too expensive, it's expense is artificial. Also - renewables can't provide base load energy to replace mos of carbon stuff. You need a powerful base load to support most renewables in the mix
The 1990s called. They want their energy economics back.
Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.
On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?
No, this is not true.
The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.
A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.
Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?
Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.
Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.
Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.
This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.
Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.
Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.
US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.
Ontario does is quite well.
This should have happened decades ago.
You really are a time traveler from the 1990s. In your comment below you say "Batteries are far too expensive, we're still a couple of decades out for that." Even excluding battery chemistry that are designed for bulk use like sodium ion, solar plus batteries is far cheaper than nuclear power. Today.
You think it's axiomatic that the insurability of nuclear power has to be socialized. Insurability is a strong and reliable financial signal. We're seeing this every day in the tech industry now with data center build out that needs credit default swaps. If you can't buy insurance at any price, it's probably not going to end well.
Solar + Batteries is cheaper only in certain conditions
> solar plus batteries is far cheaper than nuclear power
Grid-scale solar plus batteries is cheaper? Citation needed.
No worries: https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2025/july/2024-25-genc...
Energy costs, of course, vary by location - so that linked report is the Australian national science (both theory and very much applied) body determining that conditions in Australia are such that the economics of nuclear power here have costs greater than that of grid scale solar + batteries + other storage technologies on horizon and being firmed up.
It would be less expensive if every 20 years some idiots wouldn't blow one of them up and render a sizable swath of land uninhabitable by doing something regarded. The cost is in making sure they don't and unfortunately it's probably here to stay.
It's actually 100% worth it even with 1 fukishima every 20 years.
There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.
Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.
The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.
If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.
We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.
Nuclear can’t provide dispatchable energy when supply is low and demand is high, same problem as renewable.
That's what batteries are for
Batteries are far too expensive, we're still a couple of decades out for that.
Renewables are a long way off from covering the base load.
They are only now crossing the threshold into 'key supply factors'.
I think "baseload" has almost lost its meaning in these discussions.
Renewables have been displacing traditional baseload generation for years. What grids actually need is reliable dispatchable capacity, peaking power and firming.
People keep bringing up winter cold spells and claiming we need "baseload" to handle them, apparently without realizing that nuclear never solved those demand peaks either.
Historically that's been the job of dispatchable generation.
Baseload is the minimum level of demand.
What's your take on why every hyperscaler is getting into nuclear if the economics are actually as you suggest?
Vague non-binding promises of cheap power in 10 years is cheaper than building clean power today.
For existing nuclear, stealing it from the other grid users is cheaper than building clean power today.
Sure, they may all be colluding together in a cynical bid to rob our future.
Or.... the full-system economics of renewables may not actually be as good as advocates claim.
They don’t have to be colluding, just lying.
By the time they build one the kids will be asking what's a hyperscaler?
Have we seen a single deployment?
One of the useful policies mentioned in the article is:
> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.
Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.
Seems, though, like most people would rather build impressive infrastructure than improve what's already there. Grid expansion and new energy production development have far more cachet than paying a bunch of people with white vans to go around fixing up houses.
> but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables plus solar
Brit here: we need renewables and storage and nuclear.
> compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
We need this x100.
> ... but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables
It's not.
Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh. Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
Interesting claims. Where are you getting those numbers?
And do you actually believe they are comparable?
German nuclear plants were producing for less than 2 cents/ kWh. Firm, day + night, summer + winter, profitable.
Intermittent renewables cost multiples of that and require massive subsidies on top and are allowed to place the burden of their intermittency on the firm producers on top of that.
Vogtle plant and the recent french rebuild cost that much for nuclear.
Batteries: https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design Solar: just google 1gw solar cost
As I thought.
So you claim as representative, not the average and not the median of nuclear power plants.
But the most expensive nuclear power plants ever produced.
Even without knowing any details about those plants, that's either statistical illiteracy or malpractice. Take your pick.
And it doesn't get better when you know the details:
- The ones you picked were all First of a Kind build (FOAK). So prototypes. It is well-documented that FOAK builds typically are 50% more expensive and longer to build than serialized builds (Nth of a Kind, NOAK). These were more around 100% longer than NOAK, for a bunch of reasons.
- A number of these were the EPR. The EPR has since been discontinued, because the manufacturer found it too hard to build. It has been replaced by the highly simplified EPR2. How is a discontinued reactor type representative of future builds?
- All of these builds were in countries that had a long hiatus in nuclear construction, so had to build up experience in the workforce, supply chain and regulators, so FOAK on steroids. Even the most experienced, France, had a gap of 18 years between the start of the previous build and the start of FV3.
- All of these builds had regulatory changes during the construction process. Sometimes massive changes, for example over 4000 changes for HPC in the UK. And not trivial things: the concrete of the outer protective shell had to be increased by 40% or something. Which has knock-on effects, because now things inside don't quite fit any longer. etc.
- New construction techniques such as modularization, factory production etc. all decrease the cost of serialized builds, but vastly increase the risk during First of a Kind builds.
And of course you are comparing installed capacity, which is an almost completely irrelevant metric. In the UK, capacity factors for solar are between 9-12%. So you have to multiply your solar numbers by 10 just to get equivalent output on average. Except average is not good enough. There is winter, there is night, there are clouds. 4h of battery are not going to get you through winter.
And you "forgot" that nuclear power plants last much, much longer than solar installations, at least twice as long, more likely 3 times and possibly 4 times. All of the plants in the US that have applied have been approved for 80 years of operations, they are now looking at 100 years and see no significant problems.
So without even taking into account new developments, you have to divide the nuclear numbers you gave by 2 and multiply the numbers for PV you gave by at least 20-80 (and that's not covering winter yet).
So $8B/GW vs. $20-80B/GW without any firming.
And which is why the price for installed capacity is not the right metric at all.
The cost of a kWh delivered reliably 24/7 is the right metric. And there nuclear shines.
And intermittents are simply not up to the job. Which is why pretty much the entire world is giving up on the fantasy of supplying an advanced industrial society using only intermittent renewables. And even the most hard-core anti-nuclear greens are coming around, as TFA reports.
As I wrote: Germany's nuclear power plants delivered reliable electricity at below 2 cents per kWh.
So you can point to a nuclear plant built in the last 10 years in the west which is massively cheaper?
If nuclear is cost effective it makes sense to build it for all capacity - in the U.K. that’s about 50GW.
If you can point me to an NOAK-build that was built with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain.
Otherwise, you are just making the circular argument that because we haven't built we shouldn't build. That makes no sense.
And yes, nuclear for all capacity makes a lot more sense than intermittent renewables for all capacity. But a more balanced mix tends to work out better.
How many hundreds of billions in subsidies and decades wasted until we reach "NOAK with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain".
The real question is cumulative emissions. Cheap and fast, even if imperfect in the shorter timeframe wins the day.
The question to answer is: Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?
> How many hundreds of billions in subsidies and decades wasted until we reach "NOAK with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain"
None. Nuclear is cheap and quick and investments in nuclear not wasted.
We have wasted decades going down the wrong path. As an example, Germany has spent almost 25 years on the failed "Energiewende" and we haven't even completed the easy half. Nuclear did not require subsidies. Intermitten renewables anywhere from €30-50 billion just in subsidies. Per year.
France converted its electricity grid to nuclear in 15 years. For a total of €228 billion in 2011 money. Not "per year", not "subsidies". But total investment.
This does not seem at all grounded in reality? Just all around misinfomration.
The existing French nuclear fleet was built with enormous state support. Germany pays €18B in EEG support. And that is decreasing as old extremely expensive renewables are leaving the problem.
What you are doing is crying about late 2000s and early 2010s renewables being expensive. Let me ask you, what relevance does that have in 2026? We don't pay those prices today.
The reality in 2026 is the outcome of Flamanville 3, Vogtle, Hinkley point C. Then we have modern projects, and proposed subsidies like:
- Darlington SMR: Close to Vogtle - Polish AP1000: Vogtle like - Czech APR1000: A step below Vogtle. - French EPR2 fleet: Absolutely insane at €100 per MWh and interest free loans alreay assuming large learning effects.
And that is before the usual timeline and budget overruns for new nuclear has happened.
Given this reply it seems like you are straying farther reality since the prospect of new nuclear is crumbling. You're not even presenting a logically sound argument. Its just victim complex and dreaming about times past.
The question to answer still remains: Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?
The only one straying from reality is you, and yes, your misinformation is tiring.
The nuclear renaissance is in full swing.
FACT SHEET: The Golden Era of American Nuclear Energy Has Arrived
https://www.energy.gov/articles/fact-sheet-golden-era-americ...
2026/09/25 | The Nuclear Renaissance: Financing the Global Expansion
https://fiasi.org/events/event/2026-09-25-the-nuclear-renais...
The nuclear power renaissance in the 21st century: Analyzing past trends, present status, and future outlook
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2026NucAn...500231A/abstra...
Clear-Eyed about Nuclear Renaissance
https://events.weforum.org/en/events/world-economic-forum-an...
A government press release, a financing conference, an academic abstract and a WEF panel. None of those links demonstrates that new nuclear is cheap or quick.
If new nuclear was cheap and quick, why are the recently proposed western subsidies tens of billions per reactor? This just doesn't add you. You realize that right?
Your own financing conference link acknowledges construction costs in the tens of billions, timelines exceeding a decade and unresolved financing.
The DOE fact sheet lists billions in government support. Does that sound cheap and quick to build?
All the links you've presented looks like an industry despereately public handouts from tax money.
But this is not surprising. The nuclear industry doesn't deliver new projects, it currently has product market fit living on tax money handouts. Presenting PowerPoints they hope to never have to flesh out the details on, since that would requrie them to admit to the costs. Just like mPower and NuScale were forced to do. The now shunned previous golden boys.
The question remains unanswered:
Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?
> If new nuclear was cheap and quick, why are the recently proposed western subsidies tens of billions per reactor?
They aren't, and some guarantees are necessary, because VEE subsidies have dramatically distorted the markets. Even the cheapest producer cannot compete with subsidized overproduction that drives prices to zero or negative, with the government picking up the decidedly non-zero cost for just those producers that are causing the problem.
And you are projecting the reality of VEE subsidies onto nuclear.
I asked Google AI if subsidies for intermittent renewables in Germany will fall:
Total volatile renewable energy (VRE) subsidies in Germany are projected to rise significantly in the short-to-medium term (peaking around 2029 at over €22 billion), driven by falling wholesale electricity prices and legacy contract obligations.
In the long term, direct generation subsidies are legally structured to fall as older contracts expire, but the total public financial burden will likely remain high or shift into different mechanisms—such as grid infrastructure funding, battery storage incentives, and backup power plant strategies—to keep the structurally unprofitable intermittent energy system viable.
What are you even saying?
Renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world. They aren't needed anymore.
And now you've shifted the goalposts again. First, nuclear was supposedly cheap and quick. Now it needs enormous government guarantees because renewables have somehow "distorted" the market.
So which way is it? Is new nuclear cheap and competitive, or does it need taxpayers to absorb its financial risks?
You can't have it both ways.
Why should we waste our limited resources on ruinously expensive new nuclear that won't deliver meaningful decarbonization?
The question remains unanswered:
Poland. €100 billion. 2026. What cuts the most cumulative CO2, fastest?
The estimate for six French EPR2s rose from €51.7 billion to €67.4 billion between 2022 and 2023. EDF’s later estimate is €72.8 billion, about 41% above the 2022 figure, before the reactors have been built.
I’d bet you the cost will be $140B when it’s all said and done, but this website won’t be around in 2044 (assuming no delays, good luck with that). You can bet regulations won’t stop changing over the span of decades either.
I’d rather have 70GW of solar and batteries deployed in a few years, and replace them with even cheaper ones in a number of decades.
> €72.8 billion,
For 6 EPR. Each EPR has 1.67 GWe. So 10.02 GW for €72.8 billion or €7.2 billion per GWe. Less than what I wrote. Versus €20-80 billion/GW for solar without firming.
Not sure why you're restricting yourself to only solar and batteries in northern european climate.
We also have, wind, firming and you know. Relying on fossil fuels for the once a decade emergency.
There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test when we still have agriculture, aviation, shipping, construction, chemicals, heavy industry and so on to decarbonize.
System studies from Australia to Denmark are converging on finding that new nuclear makes the system vastly more expensive. Even when assuming your "NOAK" costs. Because no one would be stupid enough to build new nuclear at Vogtle or Flamanville prices.
Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability. It always relied on fossil fuels to solve the hard times.
You raise the floor, but that's quite meaningless when the hard times are far far above the yearly baseload requirement. Even when factoring in scheduling maintenance around it. And theen adding that your nuclear fleet may be like the Swedish or French one and have half the capacity offline when it is needed.
> Not sure why you're restricting yourself to only solar and batteries in northern european climate.
I didn't. The post I was responding to compared solar + batteries to nuclear.
Completely incorrectly, it turns out.
Realistic studies show that grids including nuclear are a LOT cheaper.
> There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test
The only ones who are doing this are the anti-nuclear ideologues.
> Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability.
That is just comically wrong. Intermittent renewables are not dispatchable. Nuclear is.
The person you are responding to is famous on the r/climateshitposting subreddit for making a post per day to take cheap potshots at "nukecels" and responding to every single comment. It's either a bot or someone who doesn't have a job and is extremely vested against nuclear. I'd rather you not engage with them because they (this account and its alt-accounts ?) are relentless and I want you to keep your sanity
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClimateShitposting/comments/1xlxdzh...
Given that you've carved out the "realistic" exception for yourself I now presume you will keep shifting goalposts. But I digress.
System costs have been the central argument against renewables ever since they became competitive on LCOE. Which is why energy-system researchers have spent years developing, validating, and publishing models that account for hourly balancing, storage, transmission, flexibility, and sector coupling.
From Denmark to Australia system cost studies find renewable energy systems vastly cheaper than if involving new nuclear. Even when sensitivity testing very low nuclear costs.
The problem with nuclear is that it still needs the same firming to match an actual grid load. It still needs storage and gas turbines.
A smaller quantity than for renewable grids sure. But given how expensive new nuclear is it doesn't matter in the end.
Here's the Danish study:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
And Australian:
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...
Please tell me how they aren't "realistic".
Your final comment conflates dispatchability with operational flexibility.
Nuclear output is controllable, and French reactors load follow. Although using a fleet controlling which reactor takes which day, and managing their fueling cycle so they can do it.
Conventional nuclear plants are economically optimized for high utilization, cannot start from shutdown on short notice, and don't eliminate the need for capacity that can respond to sudden shortages, demand peaks, and unexpected outages.
There is a significant difference between supplying dependable energy throughout the year and economically covering the relatively few hours when residual demand becomes exceptionally high.
I am not going to follow you Gish gallop and debunk every single "study" that uses the same old wrong assumptions to make nuclear look bad.
As an example, the Australian CSIRO "study" you cite is deeply flawed.
1. Incorrect lifetime assumptions
It assumes nuclear power plants only last 30-35 years. In reality they last 80-100 years. So they are actually 3x cheaper than reported. Same trick as used in the infamous Fraunhofer ISE "study"
2. Incorrect assumptions about sunk costs
The report incorrectly treats already spent capital costs (on renewable infrastructure) as "free".
3. Underestimation of system costs
The report incorrectly averages metrics over longer time periods and thus vastly underestimates the costs of intermittency.
4. Incorrect capacity factors for nuclear.
Capacity factors between 50-80% are assumed. In reality even the world-wide average is over 80% and well-run fleets like in the US are over 90%. Again, same shady trick used in the infamous Fraunhofer ISE "study"
So same-old same-old. And as I said before: not going to debunk every single instance of always-the-same disinformation.
Denmark is now looking at nuclear, because the renewables-only strategy has failed.
https://kernekraftalliancen.dk/en/#myths
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As far as I'm aware, it indeed is.
Yep, and renewables + batteries are only getting cheaper. Nuclear takes a long time to build. A new plant planned today will be obsolete before construction ends.
Nuclear fans on HN don’t get that nuclear was the answer in the 90s, but is not today.
The problems in the U.K. specifically are more about grid capacity (both long distance and local substation level) and nonsense regulations (why can’t I have pluggable battery to go with my pluggable solar) than in generation.
Citation needed. For example Flamanville 3 (France) was estimated to cost around €3.3 billion, costs ballooned to over €13-19 billion. There are other similar examples such as Hinkley Point C (UK). Also maintenance is much more expensive and don't forget the cost for storing nuclear waste + decomissioning. Compare that to renewables...
Do you think FV3 is a representative sample?
It's a protest vote. Anti-fascist eco-fascism isn't a viable basis for the coherent governance of anything larger than an ecovilliage.
That said, it seems neither pragmatism nor ideological coherence is really necessary to hold power these days.