ViewTrick1002

That’s not what we are seeing in reality. In Spain the nuclear plants massively load follow. Same as I just mentioned they do in Sweden.

Pretending they can just do “baseload” in 2026 doesn’t work. They can bid negative, but that’s just extending the life of the plant a few extra years.

And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available.

And this is today a purely physical problem. You only need to look to Australia to see grids where rooftop solar today crowds out all other sources, even utility scale renewables. How do you force them to buy ruinously expensive grid based nuclear?

A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.

Gas turbines are cheap in CAPEX and expensive in OPEX. They can cope with it, although even they have trouble with the sliver of hours left after solar, wind and storage make up the bulk. Since that’s a far slimmer portion than their bread and butter peaking style of operation

The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.

We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.

And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.

Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.

That’s for new nuclear. Existing nuclear reactors operate on the whim of the markets.

For that we have energy futures, or just bidding negative, if you don’t want to turn off. But anyone buying the electricity will ask themselves why they should pay a premium for nuclear electricity at the height of summer when the continent is flooded with solar

Here’s an article in Swedish how a reactor was turned off for about a week due to consistently low prices. While another reactor at the same plant was already having maintenance done.

https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/forsmark-2-ur-drift-pa-agarna...

The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.

It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.

Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.

But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.

Last spring, there was some kind of payment outage at my local grocery store, so only cash was accepted.

The cash register rejected about a third of the bills I had been keeping in my wallet, simply because they had become so battered from sitting there.

That's the state of cashless in Sweden today.

Please re-check your numbers, since they’re all wrong.

For example, the world deployed 1600 GWh batteries in 2025.

I would check out these recent articles. They’ve taken the step to model the entire grid hour by hour.

This is of course not how reality will play out, since the grid is market driven, but it’s quite interesting to see the results.

Denmark 2026:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Finland 2025:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Australia 2025–26:

https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

I have a hard time taking you seriously when you claim that Germany replaced nuclear with fossil gas. It has been roughly flat for the past 20 years while coal generation collapsed, renewables exploded and nuclear disappeared.

And this still assumes that rebuilding a nuclear industry somehow is an end in itself. It isn't.

The objective is to decarbonize society. Not construt nuclear reactors. We don't have any special obligation to build new nuclear, anymore more than there was an obligation to keep building oil-fired power plants once they stopped making economic sense.

Those system cost analyses easily solve, at far lower costs than involving new nuclear.

Which is like in the polar high north of the arctic circle?

What’s the relevance?

Which is why the best possible days for the first EPR2 reactor in France is 2038 with massive state support.

Or just build renewables and storage? Distributed and extremely cheap.

The answer twenty years ago is not the same as the one today.

Nuclear weapons or nuclear power?

Weapons yes, power seems quite stupid given the costs and lead times.

That’s exactly why I prefer whole-system modelling over simple LCOE comparisons. Backup, seasonal balancing, transmission, lifetime and integration costs all need to be accounted for.

What I find interesting is that the system studies I’ve been looking at, from Australia to Denmark and Finland, still don’t find new nuclear improving the least-cost outcome.

And they’re not assuming another Vogtle, Flamanville or Hinkley. They generally give nuclear much more optimistic NOAK or adjusted future costs.

So I’m curious: what system-cost study are you relying on that reaches the opposite conclusion?

I’ll take that as confirmation that you can’t identify a single false claim.

Which is unsurprising, since all six are based on publicly available information.

Which bullet is false? Be specific.

The Price-Anderson act and equivalents around the world tells a different story.

In Sweden in 2022 the right wing coalition which won promised new nuclear would appear if only it was allowed. Quickly they abandoned large scale nuclear in favor of SMR, PowerPoints reactors are always cheap.

Four years later, we are at:

- The state takes essentially all financial risk, even borrowing the money because Vattenfall refuses to put it on its own balance sheet.

- The state provides a huge direct taxpayer handout.

- The state takes the construction risk. Cost overruns means taxpayers put in more.

- The state subsidizes the entire final waste repository.

- The state subsidizes roughly the entire accident liability.

- The state guarantees the electricity price for 40 years.

That rather proves the point about what happens when new nuclear meets actual financing conditions.

And right wing coaltion just lost the latest election two weeks ago. Seems like we didn't get any new nuclear after all.

Given that the nuclear industry would shut down overnight if having to pay its own insurance costs it’s quite hard to take you seriously when you say it’s not subsidized.

How many hundreds of billions or trillions should we waste to get ”learnings” when renewables and storage is already the cheapest energy source in human history?

This line of thinking seems to start with that we must have new nuclear, for some reason, and then try to rationalize it.

That is 210 MW thermal. Which would produce about 70 MW electricity.

$2.8B for 70 MW is insanely expensive.

This assumes learning rates never seen by nuclear energy. Within generations we've seen small learnings, and between generations the nuclear energy has been all negative learning by doing.

That’s for the whole economy.

Transport is generally put at - 15-25% increase. Due to both needing less refinement and transport, and just how efficient BEVs are.

We did try to build nuclear. Massive subsidy programs were created, it just didn’t deliver.

Making an already uncompetitive energy source even more expensive.

Which we are replacing with renewables? Trying to shove fossil fuels into the picture seems like a false comparison?

"Multi pronged" works when different technologies complement each other. The problem is that renewables and nucelar power competes for the same slice, a battle nuclear loses with a mile. Any grid will include emergency reserves. But those optimize for lowest possible CAPEX and higher OPEX. Since they sit idle most of the time.

Nuclear power has the opposite spread of ruinously expensive CAPEX and acceptable OPEX.

I would say the pandemic shows that you do not need to account for every possibility. Humanity is amazing at adapting itself and finding new solutions to the problem at hand, rather than wasting all our resources trying to prevent the next made up disaster.

This is why we model with 10 year winters, X00 year floods or similar. Fix reasonable problems, leave the tail risk as tail risk. The worst that happens are rolling blackouts until the grid adapts, which is no different than any other outage due to grid maintenance or someone cutting a cable with a digger.

This is having decided that we must waste money and resources on new nuclear, and trying to rationalize it.

We fix tail risks when we encounter them. Not by envisioning your pet ones to make your solution fit.

They just model the weather hour by hour. But you’re made up scenario is of course impossible to cover.

Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues? Or the majority of the Eastern European due too hot or low rivers? Or half the Swedish fleet multiple times the last couple of years?

Please do tell what is wrong with the CSIRO GenCost.

If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them. Evidently they are not free.