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Comment by mitxela | Hacker News Reader

Or renewables. I remind you that nuclear power is completely economically unviable today because it is the single most expensive way to generate power. Even with Trump rolling back safety regulations, it's still too expensive when solar panels are 10 cents per watt, nuclear is 50, and the amount of backup storage to offset the unreliability does not bridge that gap.

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Nuclear is great at replacing gas-fired power stations, which has a few costs that are not included in the price.

Gas is dispatchable, nuclear is not. It’s enormously expensive, and that expense is locked in whether you need the power or not.

We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.

Gas is used as backup in a grid dominated by cheap renewable. High capex sources like nuclear are a poor replacement.

Do you mean kwh? Your per Watt is way off.

Also France is around 7c (euro) per kwh from nuclear generation. If the whole west was all in on nuclear for last 50 years it would have resulted in lower per kwh costs.

What would solar's cost per kWh be? GP means the cost of the asset per peak generation power. 0.1/W seems about right, to an order of magnitude at least.

France has big wind farms too.

and i remind you that this framing is completely misleading outside the world of simulations and calculations.

Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.

I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.

> I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.

Nuclear fans across the internet seems to have adopted this talking point recently and none of them have noticed it doesn't make any sense.

What are you even claiming here?

So you’re saying that nuclear has to be running 100% of the time at its highly expensive price per MWh (“base load”)

And that you can’t scale nuclear to provide all the power as the peaks are only needed rarely.

Which means that when other sources are cheaper (renewables), those must be banned to ensure nuclear gets paid more?

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