The Hinckley Point C EPR reactor would have produced electricity at a rate below £20/MWh instead of a planned £80/MWh if it was financed by government bonds.
Nuclear won't save the planet, as few countries can develop a nuclear industry. But for countries that have one, it should be a no brainer if not for irrational nuclear bomb fears.
And in the current geopolitical climate, expect more countries to build a bomb.
If nukes get involved, all bets are off no matter what, millions of people would die and the consequences of a subsequent reactor meltdown would be negligible compared to the mess you've got already.
And even compared to a conventional war, nuclear accidents are benign next to armed conflicts. (Not only during the war, but also decades after: most people are familiar with the Chernobyl red zone, but there's red zone in France due to the eternal pollution caused by WWI ammunitions).
This is a misrepresentation. There is a single person who the courts have established was (to their satisfaction) killed by nuclear exposure from Fukushima, although even that is quite debatable.
But that doesn't mean there weren't any victims, just that they could not (or could not yet) be identified. The estimated ~200 cancer deaths from Fukushima will mostly be lost in a sea of cancers from other causes. This doesn't mean they can be, or should be, ignored. Regulation is not like criminal law; one does not have to prove a technology is guilty beyond reasonable doubt to regulate it.
In comparison to the 19000 persons who died directly from the Tsunami? Yes it can be neglected. That's two orders of magnitude smaller!
> Regulation is not like criminal law; one does not have to prove a technology is guilty beyond reasonable doubt to regulate it.
No industry on earth is even remotely as regulated as nuclear industry. Over the span of the period your “200 excess death” have been calculated, more people in that particular region of Japan will have died from industrial causes, from any other industry (you should check how many people die each year from professional deceases in places as mundane as hairdressing saloons … Should we ban hair coloring?)
It has never been a nuclear accident to begin with, it was just a negligible (<1% in the pessimistic estimates) aggravation of the consequences of natural disaster.
Also nobody died from radiations. The additional cancer is caused by contamination, which is an entirely different health hazard for all intent and purpose.
If we extend renewables and batteries on historical experience curves they could become incredibly cheap, with solar well below $0.01/kWh. Nuclear couldn't even make an operating profit in an environment with solar that cheap.
Most of the European population leave on places that are more northern then Montreal, we have less than 8 hours of daylight per day, and a significant fraction of it is cloudy.
There's no storage solution that can store the excess summer solar exposure (when we get more than 16hours on sun per day) to reinject it into the grid in winter. That's literally science fiction tech, and that's what you'd need to make solar + storage a reliable source in Europe.
Solar in California, India or the middle east? Sure. Solar in Europe, Canada and even Japan, good luck (and yes, these countries constitute most of nuclear power plants operators).
At $0.01/kWh, PV electricity, if converted to resistive heat, would be below the cost of Henry Hub natural gas heat. And this heat would be very storable in artificial geothermal at maybe 600 C, where it would lose < 1% of stored energy per month.
Would this have low round trip efficiency if converted back to electricity? Sure. But if the PV electricity is that cheap, so what?
When levelized cost is low enough, there's plenty of room for engineering to work around intermittency and seasonality.
HN crank solves global warming with one weird trick.
You can finance the competition in the same way and get similarly cheaper prices.
Hinkley Point C just got a loan at a 7% interest rate to finish the plant. That is after about all uncertainty should already have been discovered.
Now add making a profit and factor in the risk on top and you’ll end up with electricity costing $400 per MWh
Not sure what risk you think come from renewables and storage?
There's still some cost factored in, unlike any other industry where the government is expected to clean up after the fact.
> Not sure what risk you think come from renewables
The grid collapse risk (See what happened in Spain last year, which caused 8 deaths, more than every nuclear power plant accidents in the Western world combined…). Grid operators are currently investing a trillion Euro in the EU alone in order to adapt the grid to the new challenges caused by intermittent and distributed energy sources, and this will never be accounted for in renewable electricity prices… (hence the paradox: the more “cheap energy” is being deployed in Europe, the more expensive the electricity prices become).
> and storage
"Storage" doesn't exist yet as a most people imagine it. Batteries can help ease a few hours of peak load/low supply but that's pretty much it, pumped storage is very situational with limited deployment capabilities. So the risk is that the technology simply never materialize.
In my part of the world the authorities can demand a clean up bond as part of giving permission to build the project. That is done to ensure that you can’t skimp on your responsibilities.
Then I just see misinformation on the Iberian blackout. Please go ahead and tell me how thermal planes not delivering the expected reactive power was caused by renewables.
Please tell me how renewables can’t deliver reactive power when the US and all other sane grids have required them to do it for close to a decade.
And with that we’re solving high 90s% of the grid. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough when we still need to solve agriculture, construction, aviation, maritime shipping, industry and so on.
All ignoring that storage on larger scales already exists.
I'm stopping here since you don't seem to be interested in facts at all.
https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib...
And then you deny the local law in my jurisdiction, because you can’t accept the outcome.
Then you say that this FERC requirement for renewables managing reactive power from 2016 does not exist.
https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/RM16-1-000....
Then you say that storage does not exist on any relevant scale. While this is reality.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
https://en.cnesa.org/latest-news/2026/1/23/an-additional-664...
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage? Why can’t you stay with the truth?
But this is also wrong.
Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
Brandolini's law. And I'm not going to spend any effort with someone who use "sources" they haven't even read…
> Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
I'm not afraid of them. I'm afraid of people making wrong decisions based on idealistic views of technologies.
Renewable (outside of hydro) are a very good complement to fossil fuels. And they are a key tool to half emissions from electricity production in most of the world where electricity production is mostly done through fossil fuels. And that's great.
But also that's it. They aren't going to carry the grid on their own, they aren't going to cure cancer or bring world peace.
But that's of course not good enough.
But you know that I am right, which is why you're trying to avoid facing reality and pretending everything I say is false, rather than dare to face it.
The consensus among grid operators and researchers is that renewable grids are a solved problem. They’ve moved on to the implementation details instead. Reddit is firmly stuck in the past though.
But, if you are curious, the modeling lands on a combination of this depending on local circumstances:
- Wind, overbuilt
- Solar, overbuilt
- Demand response
- Long range transmission to smooth out variability
- Existing nuclear power (for the grids that have them)
- Exising hydro
- Storage
- In places with district heating: CHP plants running on carbon neutral fuels.
- An emergency reserve of gas turbines. Run them on carbon neutral fuel if their emissions matter.
Why do you want to waste tens of billions of euros on handouts per new built large scale reactor?
“I've spent 5 hours reading official materials before responding to a comment on HN”, yeah, sure.
> The consensus among grid operators and researchers is that renewable grids are a solved problem.
The consensus is that you have no understanding of the topic.
I recently followed this [cycle of conferences on the future of electricity grids]( https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/agenda/seminaire/la-tran...) and the researchers's opinion is the litteral opposite of what you've just said.
Who should I believe, the professional or the HN crank using perplexity. Though question …
Then you go link a seminar from unknown people in French as your source.
But I get it. You Frenchies truly are in the shit.
The new Greece of Europe economically with a spiraling debt being completely unable to reign it in. With a crumbling nuclear fleet you are unable to replace in time. Which renewables are already cratering the earning potential for.
The perfect solution to that of course is an absolutely stupidly large handout to new built nuclear power!
So go ahead. Link some internationally credible research telling me how wrong I am. You still haven't been able to do it, which is extremely telling,
“On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog” as the saying goes, buy everyone knows you're a lame troll.
Thanks again for confirming that not a thing I've said has been false.
Why are you so afraid of renewables? When will France fix their economy by not wasting hundreds of billions on insane handouts and state capitalism?
= a source that you picked at random without reading it (and which doesn't back your argument since it acknowledges the fact that renewable render the grid more vulnerable, but who cares about the facts).
> Why are you so afraid of renewables?
I'm not, it's a projection of your own fear of nuclear though. Scary atoms making up everything.
> When will France fix their economy by not wasting hundreds of billions on insane handouts and state capitalism?
It's funny because France has among the cheapest electricity in Europe and the nuclear operator have been forced to subsidize its competitor to compensate for the competitive advantage of NPP. (ARENH, but you're not gonna read about it either).
It also verifies that the US has required non-synchronous plants to manage this for the past decade. And for that matter, I just picked the US because it is well known jurisdiction. All reasonable grids, except Spain until after the blackout, have the same regulations in terms of managing reactive power.
Managing reactive power is trivial to do today. But since it is not free it won't be done unless if the grid operator requires it.
I have no fear of nuclear power. I always argue that we should keep our existing nuclear reactors around as long as they are:
1. Safe
2. Needed
3. Economical
In that order. The problem is wasting decades of opportunity cost and trillions on handouts to new built nuclear power when we still need to decarbonize industry, aviation, shipping, construction, agriculture etc.
And then you finish off by living on almost half a century old merits. Like I said, the French should keep the fleet around as long as the criteria I mentioned above requires it.
The problem is wasting hundreds of billions on handouts to new built nuclear power when renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history.
Don't let the French pride make you become the next Greece.
The finished grid will be far more robust, better able to handle local outages and issues, and generally more adaptive and open to development in various directions.
As for "cheap energy" raising prices - prices rose a little after Covid, but there's been no constant march upwards. The main driver of higher prices is gas, and eliminating gas dependence, for both for financial and strategic reasons, is a key goal.
The current situation in Iran is likely to increase that motivation.
A key point about renewables is that power doesn't rely on imports from war zones.
At the $400/MWh you are postulating, that would be €800 billion of income.
Although I am sure the operators wouldn't mind (15% ROI per year over 80 years is...nice) I am going to go with "your numbers are BS".