Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

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We had nuclear power in Italy. From my house, I could see the cooling towers of the abandoned nuclear power plant in Trino [1] in the distance.

There was a referendum in November 1987 asking whether to abolish any form of nuclear power. It won with 80% of yes votes. This was a year after the Chernobyl disaster. Over the next few decades, Italy started to import electricity at a premium, mostly from its French neighbour, which has never stopped investing on nuclear and is today Europe's largest electricity exporter.

No politician dared touch this hot potato ever again for the following 24 years, until the June 2011 referendum, that asked whether to revive plans for nuclear power. It failed with 94% of No votes. This was 3 months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

I do not trust politicians, nor anti-nuclear activists, to ever do the right thing and drop their outdated stance on the matter.

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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi_Nuclear_Power_Pla...

I agree with you on all counts, it's especially sad that we're still basically bound to an irrational emotional response to Chernobyl.

Just a bit of context for non-Italians:

> It failed with 94% of No votes.

Referendums in Italy have weird rules. They may only be called to repeal existing laws. In this case, the then-standing Berlusconi IV cabinet had approved a new nuclear plan, and a referendum was called to abolish it. A referendum is successful if both the repeal votes are more and the turnout is more than 50%. So if you don't want to repeal the law, you just don't go to the polls at all.

This is just to say that when looking at Italian referendums the important number is not the Yes/No valid votes but the turnout, which in this case was 55% or something like that IIRC.

I'd agree that the public opinion is still anti-nuclear, but it's more 55-45 than 95-5.

>still basically bound to an irrational emotional response to Chernobyl.

It's hardly irrational. Nuclear power is effectively still uninsurable by private insurers and the taxpayer clean up bill for Fukushima is around $800 billion.

It wouldn't be irrational to build more power stations if they were cheap but nuclear power is even less economic than using wind and solar power to synthesize gas for storage and burning that to generate electricity:

https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

> $800 billion

Even taking that figure completely at face value, that's... not a lot of money? Italy's GDP is 2.1T, if a Fukushima-like disaster happens once in 30 years (which it doesn't, but for the sake of argument let's say it does), that's an amortized cost of 1% of the GDP.

We're Italians, we'd waste that kind of money on some stupid shit anyway.

You mean you waste it on corruption (and the Mafia)? My family is Italian, and I do love the country, and it could be a true financial powerhouse...but the corruption will literally kill the country one day, I have very little doubt Italy as the current entity will fail (honestly I am surprised that covid didn't bankrupt the country, so that was a positive).

Italy has been slowly going down for the last 30 years. Too many small businesses that are not competitive, providing lower salaries; populism rose. The State of Italy is spending ~30 billions each year for improving the insulation of old buildings, without lowering emissions significantly or having a real effect on the economy. With all the money that have already been spent just on this measure, Italy could have built so many nuclear reactors that it would have ensured zero carbon emission electricity for many years. That is just an example.

"5 months GDP is a reasonable cost" is not the argument in favor of nuclear power that you think it is.

The cost of energy does not only depend on the cost of production: Denmark has a lot of cheap wind energy, but it costs almost three times more than in France. And the higher share of intermittent sources you have, the less valuable the production of energy can be, because it is sometimes produced when not needed, so you need to build up infrastructure, accumulators, etc.

Nuclear is insurable, and in some countries is mandatory: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and...

The difference in electricity costs between France and Denmark (and pretty much any other such simplistic comparison you see) is often highly influenced by taxation policy.

You can tax energy use to encourage conservation or you can subsidize it via general taxes.

https://energy.ec.europa.eu/data-and-analysis/energy-prices-...

The wholesale electricity prices in Denmark and France are both directly in line with the EU average. Switch to consumer prices and Denmark becomes the maximum, and France drops below the average.

You can see a similar pattern with gas (both natural gas and gasoline) prices, they're roughly the same wholesale but Denmark's consumer prices are higher.

Is it Denmark really putting taxes on electricity so high that a kWh costs 2 times more than in France? Just to reduce consumption?

The interesting data you linked clearly shows the problem with high mix of renewables: even if the average wholesale price is the similar, the final cost can be way higher because people need electricity at 6 PM and not so much at 4 AM, and the costs of a more unstable system are higher (such as delivery costs). Similar production price, totally different value. That is the difference between LCOE and the costs estimates which include other factors, such as the firming intermittency price estimations published in Lazard 2023.

The similar patter you see in oil and gas could be because of taxes, but the difference is below 10 %, not 200 %.

The biggest difference is that Denmark built its wind farms a lot more recently than France built its nuclear power plants. The cheapest power plant is the one that is already built.

Nonetheless, I would expect France's electricity prices to rise significantly in the coming years as their 1970s plants all age out and decommissioning costs + the cost of brand new plants kicks in.

They have also publicly announced that they won't be replacing all of the nuke plants that will age out (presumably because of cost). So, the % of nuclear power on France's grid will decline with solar or wind or carbon producing fuels having to make up the difference.

France's total electricity production from nuclear is expected to rise, actually: the government, after abandoning the plan to have nuclear covering just 50 % of its electricity mix, removed the cap on the total nuclear power installed. In addition to that, almost all the existing reactors got their life extended (so up to 50 years of operating life), and the final aim is to reach 60 years. 6 new reactors have been approved, and another 8 could get approved. Basically, the whole President Holland's plan from 2014 on reducing nuclear has been dismantled.

Denmark's renewables are highly subsidized, construction is quick (which means short-term loans), so it should not impact so much on energy prices. Finland has built the first-of-a-kind highly delayed EPR 3 reactor Olkiluoto 3, and the electricity prices felt sharply nonetheless.

I do not see the reason why decommissioning costs should make electricity more expensive in the future, because the owner has to pay and prove that the decommissioning will be done even if the company goes bankrupt (by allocating funds in advance or by providing an insurance).

This is not to say that a solution is better than the other: it is always a matter of finding a good energy mix for a network. France is investing in energy efficiency and renewables as well.

France went from choosing between new nukes and renewables (renewables were the obviously cheaper choice) to choosing between extending the life of the nukes it already has and renewables (no surprises, old nukes were cheaper). This doesn't contradict the suggestion that the high cost of new nukes is prohibitive when set against renewables.

>Italy started to import electricity at a premium, mostly from its French neighbor

Of course the French taxpayers now face decades of vast nuclear decommissioning costs. Italy doesn't. Rather as a country with lots of sun and many sparsely populated windy areas it can stock up on increasingly cheap renewables aided by possibly dirt cheap future battery prices. So you may be right, but equally maybe history will look quite favorably on Italy's energy choices. We will see.

If those voters were so very wrong on their risk assessment then we can presumably also get rid of the extremely low catastrophe liability cap:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

If it's extremely safe we can let private insurers decide whether to shoulder the financial burden of a Fukushima style event and taxpayers no longer have to be on the hook for those pesky $1 trillion clean up events.

I'm all in favor of eliminating the act and adopting a wait and see approach to "will sophisticated insurers have an appetite for this risk?" but for some reason a lot of pro nuclear activists who are adamant that it is 110% safe aren't so sure about slashing this subsidy.

Why do you think that is?

What does US corporate welfare has to do with Italian public votes?

Every country that has a private sector building nuclear power has some kind of liability carve out.

They should have built renewables and they would have cheaper energy than ever. You can't remove energy sources without replacement.

In any real case they should have both built out renewable energy and maintain and even expand the existing fleet of nuclear reactors. Nuclear might be historically expensive and storage an issue, but it is carbon free, and for the moment that is the most important problem we need to solve.

Additionally to what the sibling commenters say, we don't have a lot of sun nor wind in the Po Valley, where most of the industries are, and please point me to any G7 country that produces most of their energy from hydroelectricity, which Northern Italy has a decent potential for.

Renewables are just now starting to become economically viable, but distribution is still an unsolved problem. The wind farms in Sardinia are not gonna power Milan.

Apart from the base load arguments, in the 1980s and 90s, solar was a total joke efficiency and cost-wise

Build renewables in 1987?

A couple billion solar panels operating at ~1% efficiency sounds like the best plan ever.

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