Yves here. In Friday’s Links, reader Michaelmas made some important observations about the US nuclear fuel model, which does only one cycle and thus produces vastly more waste than necessary. That has been a feature as opposed to a bug. Further, he contends that reprocessing plus current technology like laser isotope separation can eliminate nuclear waste.
Admittedly, nuclear waste is not the only reason environmentalists oppose nuclear energy. They also point to catastrophe risk and hazards to wildlife from water cooling processes, which are more pronounced for nuclear plants than other water-cooled power facilities.
As many of you know, as AI and data center power demands are soaring, tech titans have been talking up nuclear power as a low-emission solution. However, a Goldman Sachs report from January argued its role would be limited, in part due to staffing issues:
While renewables have the potential to meet most of the increased power needs from data centers at some times of day, they don’t produce power consistently enough to be the only energy source for data centers….
Nuclear energy has almost zero carbon dioxide emissions — although it does create nuclear waste that needs to be managed carefully. But the scarcity of specialized labor, the challenges of obtaining permits, and the difficulty of sourcing sufficient uranium all pose a challenge to the development of new nuclear power plants…
How much will nuclear power increase?
Recent contracts for nuclear energy facilities along with signs of countries’ greater appetite for nuclear power suggest a significant increase of investment in the next five years, and a corresponding rise in power supply in the 2030s.
The proliferation of AI data centers has boosted investor confidence in future growth in electricity demand at the same time as big tech companies are looking for low-carbon reliable energy. This is leading to the de-mothballing of recently retired nuclear generators, as well as consideration for new larger-scale reactors.
In the US alone, big tech companies have signed new contracts for more than 10 GW of possible new nuclear capacity in the last year, and Goldman Sachs Research sees potential for three plants to be brought online by 2030.
What could help dispel US nuclear dependence on Russia for enrichment is a properly capable nuclear power industry that recycles nuclear fuel and is moving towards closing the nuclear fuel cycle.
Mind you, yours truly has repeatedly called for radical conservation, as in greatly trying to reduce resource consumption, before climate-change-induced collapse forces it upon us. But that view has an even smaller audience now than Before AI.
So one reason to discuss the fact that nuclear waste is a choice, not a necessity, is to try to persuade activists to demand nuclear waste-free new builds. If they can’t stop them, and the political winds suggest not, the fallback is to demand a much safer implementation.
Now to the discussion by Michaelmas, in Links 9/12/2025. I’ve combined two comments:
Nuclear waste is a myth that the US promoted to justify its crappy once-through fuel cycle model, which it set up entirely for political and economic reasons. So when various folks here complain that they don’t like nuclear power because ‘we don’t know how to get rid of the waste,’ they’re ignorantly repeating propaganda that the likes of the CIA have promoted.
We DO know how to ‘get rid of the waste.’ Talk to anybody in the nuclear industry. If they’re honest, they’ll tell you the reason nobody’s ever solved the problem of how to bury that ‘waste’ deep enough so it won’t be a problem for several centuries or millenia is that nobody who knows anything realistically expects that ‘waste’ to stay in the ground because people will probably use it for fuel in the next one or two centuries.
Because it’s barely-used fuel. In the US once-through nuclear fuel cycle, merely 3% to 5% of the original uranium fuel’s total energy content is extracted and used in the reactor before the fuel is discarded. Specifically, Uranium-235, the fissile isotope, comprises only about 0.7% of natural uranium, and enrichment boosts this to 3–5% for reactor use. After fission, a significant amount of U-238 remains.
This isotope could be converted into plutonium-239 and reused in breeder or reprocessing cycles—but in the US once-through model, it’s discarded. So are other actinides formed during operation that also retain substantial energy potential, but aren’t tapped unless reprocessing is done.
In closed or advanced fuel cycles (e.g. MOX fuel, fast reactors), reprocessing raises total energy extraction to 60–90%, depending on the technology and number of recycles. Furthermore, with 21st century technology like laser isotope separation (LIS) —
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/laser-isotope-separation
the remainder that can’t be reprocessed for fuel can be transmuted. There’s no need for any ‘nuclear waste’ to exist.Why does the US nuclear industry have its crappy nuclear power model? This is due to: –
[1.] The mid-20th century historical contingency that Admiral Rickover’s nuclear submarine program developed the boiling water reactor model first and this military application was then ported over to civilian application, and the US has been incapable of moving on from this 75-year old technology;
[2.] As always, the US government placed profitability for US corporations first, and discarding barely-used fuel as so-called waste without recycling seemingly promised greater profits for US energy corporations;
[3.] The US wanted to maintain its nuclear hegemony as much as possible and be able to threaten other states who didn’t have nuclear weapons, and reprocessing technologies are dual use — they’re nuclear enrichment technologies, too.
If you’ll recall, in the 1970s and 80s the US beef with the French nuclear power industry industry was essentially that it did reprocessing and the US beef with the Iranian nuclear industry is that it’ll permit enrichment now…
All flag-waving — yours and mine — aside, the point here is that had nuclear power been handled intelligently, and particularly had the US not implemented the nuclear policies it did both at home and abroad, then how much global climate forcing by CO₂ release could have been avoided?
Let’s suppose, specifically, that the world as a whole had moved to nuclear power along the model France implemented in the 1970s. France today generates around 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear, so it’s one of the lowest per-capita CO₂ emitters among industrialized nations. One recent analysis I’ve seen claims that France’s nuclear program has prevented emissions equivalent to 28 times its total CO₂ output in 2023 over the past 47 years.
Okay. Scaling that globally, if the world had followed France’s lead starting in the 1970s or 1980s, we can estimate:
Global electricity-related CO₂ emissions could have been slashed dramatically. Electricity generation accounts for roughly 40% of global CO₂ emissions. Including plant construction, nuclear emits some 4 grams of CO₂ per kWh, as compared to 400–1000 grams for coal and 200–500 grams for gas. That’s a 99 percent reduction in many cases.
As the world has emitted over 1,700 gigatonnes of CO₂ since 1850, and about 1,000 gigatonnes since 1970, a nuclear-powered world could plausibly have avoided 300–500 gigatonnes of that.
In turn, given that the models suggest that every 1,000 gigatonne of CO₂ adds approx. 0.45 degrees C of warming, that means we might have avoided 0.13–0.23°C of warming, which is a substantial dent in the currently visible 1.2 degrees C rise.
(Visible, because there’s another 3 to 8 degrees of warming in the pipeline currently being masked by aerosol particulate release.)
So yet again, bad incentives and short-termism have become so deeply embedded that most who discuss nuclear power have little idea how and wasteful the US approach to nuclear power is. Raising awareness is a first step to making that change.
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All very accurate points about nuclear waste being in fact very valuable fuel to be burned in more sanely designed reactors, the history of why that is not done, etc.
However, this:
Is not actually true.
The history of energy is one of new sources being added to, not substituting previous ones.
You see it with renewables now — there has been a massive build up of renewables over the last few decades, but what happened to emissions? They kept rising all the same.
You can go further back when fossil fuels first started being used on a large scale in Britain instead of wood. Did that lower the use of wood for fuel? Well, I guess you can say it did, but that was primarily because the forests were already cut and there was no wood to be burned anyway. But in the long-term did the use of fossil fuels bring the forests back? Not at all, perhaps a little bit in the US northeast (though one can argue whether that was more because those were always agriculturally marginal areas), but on a global scale we deforested more of the planet than ever before. When they started burning coal in Britain in the 17th and 18th century Sumatra and Borneo were 100% rainforest, so were Mato Grosso, Rondonia, Tocantis and Maranhao in Brazil. Today Sumatra has 5% of its forest left, and only thanks to having some tall mountains, the southern half of Borneo is fully destroyed, most of the Brazilian states I listed suffered the same fate too, and this is just the most notable for their size examples, tropical forests have been decimated everywhere.
Then coal was replaced by oil as the primary transportation fuel in the early 20th century. Did that reduce global coal consumption? Not at all, it is higher now than it has ever been.
This is a fundamental principle. Jevon’s paradox strictly defined is about efficiency improvements, but it applies all the same to substitution with new energy sources.
Because the core problem is a system that depends on perpetual growth, and you can never satisfy the demands of exponential growth.
Plus, you literally boil the planet within a few centuries at current rates of economic growth just from the waste heat, regardless if the energy source, i.e. even if someone was to find a way to produce antimatter by cheating (i.e. not investing the energy equivalent or more into producing it, but somehow flipping the sign by magic) and then control it, we are still utterly screwed.
It’s not true that {higher absolute coal consumption} = {no reduction in coal usage caused by oil}. The appropriate number to compare against current coal usage would be {hypothetical coal usage in a 2025 world without oil}, not {coal usage in 1880}.
I think it’s reasonable to assume coal consumption would have ~maintained its former rate of increase in the developed West if oil hadn’t come on the scene. Then with the oil case you have to wonder – how would massive availability of different energy inputs have impacted the development of oil production on the margins, the expensive kinds ie fracking, tar sands. The unit economics start to look pretty different and I have to imagine these industries are at least delayed in their development.
You note rightly that Jevon’s paradox was formulated wrt efficiency improvements, not wrt addition of different energy inputs. It’s dicey to reason by analogy that Jevon’s p would apply just the same in the energy inputs case… this requires massive assumptions about supply/demand elasticities, substitutability of different energy types, and the messy workings of a dynamic macro system. But I’m getting ahead of myself- let’s just talk about the efficiency case. 21st century economists have not found Jevon’s hypothesis to hold generally re efficiency gains. Jevon found that what we would now call the rebound effect was so strong it amounted to a full backfire, ie. a rebound above 100%. Whether they’re modeling, simulating, or empirically investigating, studies these days tend to find rebound effects more like 5-20%. So 5-20% less of a usage reduction than one might expect, but still a reduction. (See The Rebound Effect and Energy Efficiency Policy, Gillingham (2015) for a lit review.) 19th century improvements to the steam engine and the associated increase in coal usage & economic activity were a truly world-historic phenomenon and there was no energy input substitute on the table whatsoever. Dangerous to reason from here to a generalized case.
I understand and agree with your point about capitalism’s systemic and irrational growth drive; what use is building up nuclear if all that extra energy goes into powering new goddamn chatbots? :(
But in this humble poster’s opinion you take the insight a step or two too far. Building up nuclear would still be incredibly useful even if we can’t ignore political economy when thinking about how it might play out. My own sense is the same as OP’s, that a capitalism with French characteristics re nuclear power generation wrecks the planet meaningfully more slowly vs the capitalism we live in. Boiling the planet “within a few centuries” vs our current trajectory is not an insignificant distinction!!
Not relevant to the real world, in which we are getting cooked from the absolute increase in coal use, and how much more it would have been without substitutes is of little comfort.
You misunderstood that point (or I misunderstood your reply) — the planet would be cooked from the waste heat of the economic activity that would be generated assuming current “desirable” rates of economic growth continue indefinitely regardless of what energy source is used to support it (thus my comment about anti-matter — the theoretically cleanest and practically infinite source of energy). Of course that will not happen — civilization will collapse long before we get to that point — but it illustrates the absurdity of relying on perpetual growth as the glue that keeps society together.
Yes, every energy transaction release waste heat. Think of the radiator and exhaust in an ICE car.. All waste heat. Every energy use releases it. From a physic post long ago…
“the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.”
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
So capitalism’s growth forever is a dead end, no matter what energy source we come up with.
I didn’t mean to imply you were literally staking your argument on the earth boiling from waste heat; I apologize if I created that impression. I understood both that para of yours and my response to it as more impressionistic, as sort of metaphors for each of our actual arguments. You’re saying capitalism is the problem, look how its inherent logic annihilates the planet in any scenario. I’m saying yes we need to ditch capitalism, but the more time capitalism itself gives us to do that the better.
Your comment reminded me of the Collier problem that i just stumbled across recently.
https://www.notechmagazine.com/2025/04/469603.html
The world will need a lot of copper to go fully electric.
I had believed 1) BWRs (boiling water reactors) were used in some early power generation stations but not much after that. It has been pressurized water reactors (PWR) since then. 2) The mere existence of Pu-239 (created in reactors since it’s almost entirely absent in nature) is a nuclear weapon proliferation risk, so making more of it increases the resist. 3) Quite a lot of anti-nuclear activism was due to fossil fuel industry astroturfing.
The current buzz is around thorium-molten salt reactors which gets rid of some of these risks, but imposes technological obstacles. It’s just getting off the ground in China now.
The real question is that if the first generation of nuclear plants could produce electricity for around ¢3 per MegaWattHour (in today’s money) why is the current price more than 10 times that?
A big part of this is the cost of redesigning a nuclear plant and going through the regulatory process again each time we build a nuclear plant instead of using a standardized design.
Besides that we use a lot more material to build a nuclear plant nowadays then we did in the past.
The claim that regulation is the source of the substantial extra cost of nuclear plants in this country is often made but needs more study, and it would be interesting to see documentation.
For example, studies of the huge cost overruns and schedule delays during the attempted construction of five plants (only one was completed) by the Washington Public Power Supply System during the 1970s found that only about 10% of the delays were due to regulation — the biggest share (30%) were due to design-related construction change orders. A notorious story about the projects was about a load-bearing wall that had to be built and torn down five times.
Your observation about standard design is on target; in the past each plant seems to have been a bespoke item. But recently built plants seem to be as plagued by delays and cost overruns as the projects back in the 70s.
It could be said that most of the design-related construction change orders are also regulatory, because the design of a power plant has to be redone during construction if there is a regulatory change that impacts the design.
But I have to admit that I would be curious as well if all the payments to all parties for a nuclear power plant, build within the last ten years, could be made public.
Besides that China seems to have figured it out.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ERK4g_Lm924&pp=ugUHEgVlbi1VUw%3D%3D
none: The current buzz is around thorium-molten salt reactors which gets rid of some of these risks
Not exactly. Indeed, au contraire.
You can turn a thorium molten salt reactor into the dandiest mini-factory for the production of weapons-grade uranium-233 with a small design modification. The classic paper on this is U‐232 and the proliferation‐resistance of U‐233 in spent fuel by Kang & von Hippel from 2007.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08929880108426485
Here’s the situation —
Thorium-232 itself isn’t fissile, but when bombarded with neutrons, it’s fertile, meaning it transmutes into uranium-233 (U233)—a fissile material that’s usable for nuclear weapons. The catch? The U233 is often contaminated with uranium-232 (U232), which emits strong gamma radiation, making weaponization hazardous and technically challenging. That U232 contamination provides the rationale for the thorium reactor’s ‘proliferation-resistance.
HOWEVER–
That U232 contamination makes handling dangerous (gamma dose rates of 13–38 rem/hr at 1 meter from a 5 kg sphere of purified U233. But thorium reactors can be optimized to produce significant quantities of U233 if the reactor design allows for chemical separation — by simply siphoning off, essentially — U233 before U232 builds up in each reactor cycle. Furthermore, the resulting material could be weapon-usable and relatively clean for handling purposes.
FURTHERMORE —
If you introduce U238 into the molten salt mixture, it can absorb neutrons and transmute into plutonium-239, the classic weapons-grade isotope.
And if you use a fast-spectrum molten-salt reactor, these allow more efficient breeding of Pu239 due to higher-energy neutrons, which are better at converting U238.
You’d have to modify reprocessing. Again, you’d need a chemical separation system to filter off the Pu239 from the salt. But a modified thorium MSR could definitely be repurposed to produce weapons-grade plutonium every cycle, as I understand it.
“The real question is that if the first generation of nuclear plants could produce electricity for around ¢3 per MegaWattHour (in today’s money) why is the current price more than 10 times that?”
Please check your units. Electricity has never been as cheap as 3¢/MWh. Not from any power source anywhere on earth. It’s not even close. Prices for solar and gas on most power exchanges in the US run around $40/MWh, which works out to 4¢/kWh. Prices for electricity from older nuclear stations (where the capital costs have been paid off) are similar, but for new stations it can be several times that.
The issue is capital costs. In South Korea, where they built their nuclear fleet for $2500/kW, electricity from nuclear costs ~5¢/kWh, which is pretty competitive. But here in the US, where our latest nuclear station was built for $15000/kW, it’s obviously quite a bit higher. The real question is this: Why are capital costs so high in the US (and Europe) when the South Koreans (and Chinese and Russians) have demonstrated the ability to do much better?
A few years ago, I read an interesting book on this subject:
Michaelmas and others like to blame the US government and nasty profit seeking American corporations for the nuclear waste problem. I like attacking the US government and corporations as much as the next guy, but I have to point out that claim is simply wrong.
The real reason is safety. If you read any industry propaganda from the 1960’s 70’s or 80’s the industry was going to feature a mix of light water reactors and fast breeder reactors with reprocessing to burn up all the waste. It turns out it is both difficult and expensive to make safe light water reactors (Chernobyl or Fukushima anyone), but it is far harder to make safe fast breeder reactors. One reason is you have to use liquid sodium as a coolant which us really nasty stuff. Another reason is if you operate it incorrectly a fast breeder reactor can actually blow up like a nuclear bomb. This is physically impossible with a standard light water reactor.
The US, France, The Soviet Union and Japan all tried building fast breeder reactors and all gave up.
Russia has been running the BN-600 since 1980, the BN-800 since 2014, and there is BN-1200 to come.
And the BREST-300, which is lead-cooled.
Rosatom has apparently been given the go-ahead to build a series of fast breeders across Russia and is co-operating with the Chinese to extend in China.
Hi GM, I haven’t looked into this recently and I stand to be corrected but as far as I can remember US industry information to completely burn both the U235 and U238 in natural Uranium you need to pass it through a series of both water moderated and fast reactors with reprocessing in between. You ended up with approximately 1 fast breeder reactor to 4 light water reactors. If this ratio is correct, then Russia is essentially still in the experimental/proof of concept phase, not the commercial implementation phase. I shouldn’t have said the Russians had given up, I agree they are still trying ;).
I hope more knowledgeable commenters will chime in, but the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station currently has 2 fast breeder reactors producing commercially, with a combined operating experience of >50 years. They appear to be close to (or have already achieved) closing the fuel cycle.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/12/russian-fast-reactor-makes-progress-to-eliminating-nuclear-waste.html
The efficiency of these reactors means that they are effectively “renewable” in the sense that they could provide all the world’s electricity continuously (uranium from ocean); the actual materials to construct them is another matter. The main problem I have with the idea of unlimited energy is the exacerbation of systemic collapse, as explained in “The Limits to Growth” (Meadows 1972):
” ‘Unlimited’ resources thus do not appear to be the key to sustaining growth in the world system. Apparently the economic impetus such resource availability provides must be accompanied by curbs on pollution if a collapse of the world system is to be avoided.”
Of course, another problem is reactors provide excellent targets for conventional missiles.
Other than that, I am all in favour.
Thanks. The late Alex Cockburn was much criticised for dismissing global warming concerns but his excuse for doing so was his claim that it was all a conspiracy to revive the nuclear industry. And his notion that nukes are worse than AGW should not be so readily discarded. Civilization will survive AGW although many species may not and great misery is likely ahead. However all life is at threat from a nuclear winter that could happen this very moment if contending ruling classes lose their minds and push “the button.” So number three on the above quoted list should arguably be number one and nuclear proliferation not simply dismissed as a side effect that can be controlled. The comment says if the world had been sensible it would have done X but the world is not sensible as the many disasters of the 20th century showed us and we are now often forgetting.
Huh? On what basis do you suggest civilization will survive? At the end of the Permian, which had a 10 degree C increase, we had 96% dieoff of ocean species. 3 degrees looks baked in and you start to get a positive feedback loop, as in more warming = more permafrost warming which = more methane releases which accelerates the warming.
https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/what-caused-earths-biggest-mass-extinction
What passes for knowledge is now overwhelmingly recorded in digital media. Chips have a limited life. If you think we are going to be able to keep up the infrastructure needed to keep producing them in a collapse scenario. I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
I’m not, I hope obviously, arguing that we should ignore global warming or do like Trump–and yes Cockburn once–and pretend there’s no such thing.
However I do question the idea that nuclear was an obvious solution too easily dismissed at the time. And that’s all I’m suggesting. I also agree with the commenters here that going for nukes rather than conservation and dialed back lifestyles will merely result in AGW plus nukes rather than a solution that solves AGW.
The real crisis of course is the world’s surging population. Adding more energy to the mix may simply encourage this.
These discussions about the viability of nuclear power assume that responsible adults will be making discusions to safeguard the rest of us. The vulnerability of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant should serve as warning enough. And the Pacific Ocean now abounds with fish made radioactive from Fukushima. Its a mystery why anyone wants more nuclear power, when readily available solar is far cheaper, and far safer.
A fundamental problem with this discussion is the regrettable tendency to treat all options as either/or binaries. What about going for nukes requires (your “rather than”) not following a degrowth path? You can’t say “capitalism” since you have to work out a solution to that cultural problem to have any hope of achieving meaningful degrowth anyway. Any meaningful reduction in consumption is going to be a long, difficult and gradual process. We would be shortsighted to rule out any practical means of limiting carbon emissions along that path.
Also to be noted, and an extremely important point that most people are not aware of or are not paying attention to — a degree of warming today is not the same as a degree of warming 250M years ago in terms of positive feedback loops because the Sun has been getting brighter ever since the solar system was formed (25% increase in 4.5 billion years).
Which is why the long-term trend for CO2 concentration is down — that is how planetary homeostasis has been maintained, by burying the carbon in the ground, partly in the form of fossil fuels, against the background of our star sending ever more heat our way. A process we are now rapidly reversing…
Just a tangential issue here to raise; energy infrastructure.
The source and amount of “new” energy production is constrained by the bottleneck of the national energy distribution system. Unless many of the proposed ‘new’ nuclear power plants are sited next to the new AI and data storage and processing facilities, or the other way around, the amount of ‘new’ power generation capacity is almost irrelevant. Getting the electric power to the end users is dependent on the power distribution grid. In America, that grid, or, more properly, grids, is ageing and haphazardly maintained. The recent experiences with electric powerline wildfires in California are the poster children for this problem.
To put is gently, America has lost its ability to plan ahead on an industrial scale for more than a handful of financial cycles.
America needs an Industrial Policy, which requires State planning, anathema to the present group of Neoliberal elites. At root, America, and the West in general needs a complete revolution in social and political philosophy. If that requires a collapse of the West, then bring it on. The rest of the World is beginning to assert itself and will chart another way forward for the Terran human race.
Stay safe.
I was thinking along similar lines.
The best infrastructure for a particular place is infrastructure that area can and will maintain over long period. That’s probably more important than it being “the latest technology”.
Saying it again here, America has not lost the ability except for congress. The partizan team dynamic in congress does not work for anything but their own reelection and attendant power. Our elected representatives have failed again and again to provide good infrastructure support. Instead choosing to fund war and now more concerned with the sex lives and religious orientation of americans.
Obama could have pushed infrastructure instead of health care but when he did get around to it the GOP wouldn’t let it happen. Biden got a comprehensive infrastructure bill through but Trump has killed it. Trump’s idea of infrastructure is build a wall and squeeze our allies.
The industrial policy favored by the anti-socialist capitalists is that all infrastructure is to be paid for by others but theirs to use. Meanwhile the electorate is happy to be ignorant of meaningful issues. Bread and circuses is working as planed.
The challenge:
is an interesting one. Once upon a time there were no nuclear power plants and there were 0 (zero) people with the specialised knowledge to build and operate a nuclear power plant. Now there are people with such knowledge but it is somehow difficult to the point of impossibility of spreading that knowledge?
The capital-cost of building a nuclear power plant is huge and the cost of training is comparatively tiny so how can there not be enough to train/educate people in how to build and operate a nuclear power plant?
I guess that part of the ‘challenge’ is the ‘modern’ way of hiring: Unless a person has the exact experience then that person is unsuitable and the only thing to do about it is to complain.
& when I follow the debate about nuclear then a couple of things comes to mind:
1. The only entity capable of dealing with a fallout is a national government
2. But national governments are not to own nuclear power plan, they have to be owned by private interests and those private interests have to get lots of subsidies from the national government or they won’t build and operate nuclear power plant.
Basically the profits are privatised while the costs and risks are socialised.
It is certainly true that the US forced PWR’s on most of the world in the early 1960’s, which was arguably the wrong option. However, as has been pointed out by a few commentators above, this didn’t constrain the Soviets/Russians or Chinese or Japan from investing very heavily in alternatives, none of which can be considered a success. The Russians, after trying several very different types, are largely falling back onto PWR’s, as are the Chinese.
The waste issue is true, up to a point. There is a lot of radioactive waste produced which isn’t directly related to the consumption of uranium – not least the construction waste from decommissioning. Reprocessing waste is carried out in several countries, but again, its never been much of a commercial success – its a very difficult and expensive process, and the resulting fuel can be problematic for a variety of reasons. Anyone familiar with the fraught history of Windscale/Sellafield will be aware of these issues.
The reality is that despite 75 years of intensive investment, nearly everyone falls back on PWR’s for commercial and military use (i.e. submarines). Pretty much every alternative design – and there are many of them – have fallen by the wayside. And its not from lack of investment, vast sums of public and private funding have gone into nuclear power by the US, UK, France, Germany, South Africa, China, Russia, India, and Japan, and still we are building what amounts to a 1950’s design, because nothing else has proven better. There is a saying in football about the player who looks better and better the longer he is on the bench – that very much applies to all the alternative nuclear designs. They look amazing, until someone tries to build one. Or, as with fusion, we are 10 years away from building a viable one, just as we have been for the last half century.
I’m somewhat sceptical of the stories about a nuclear renaissance thanks to AI demand (or whatever current justification has been given). There is a regular cycle of enthusiasm for nuclear energy worldwide, but it rarely gathers much momentum, for the simple reason that they are very expensive to build and it is very slow to get them operating. The latter point is a huge consideration – you can go from permitting to producing energy for solar, wind or gas generation in a fraction of the time for a nuclear plant in most countries. Even China has struggled to build them at scale to an acceptable budget. The reality is that extremely cheap solar energy along with increasingly cheap storage has killed nuclear power economics. The only justification now for nuclear in most grids is resilience and domestic security – certainly not cost.
“despite 75 years of intensive investment, nearly everyone falls back on PWR”, what was that investment in numbers? And where?
“The reality is that extremely cheap solar energy along with increasingly cheap storage has killed nuclear power economics. ”
In recent years, Egypt, a country with plenty of land for solar energy (hardly any clouds in the sky, no drastic summer/winter differences) with zero NIMBY issues, decided on nuclear power to augment national electricity production. Was it some colossal error in calculations? Some numbers are needed to show the real potential for solar as a dominating electricity source.
What was the lyric in that Tom Lehrer song? Oh right…
PlutoniumKun: The reality is that extremely cheap solar energy along with increasingly cheap storage has killed nuclear power economics. The only justification now for nuclear in most grids is resilience and domestic security – certainly not cost.
[1.] I wouldn’t argue otherwise, but that the justification for nuclear in a grid powered mostly by renewables would be resilience and domestic security. If resilience is defined as having a 24-hour reliable power backbone for when renewables fail.
Because they will fail. They did in winter 2021-22 in the UK when it had exceptionally low wind speeds and clouds, which reduced renewable energy output by 35-40 percent. (Simultaneously a fire knocked out part of a 2GW subsea cable importing electricity from France, two nuclear reactors were retired, and gas plants underwent planned shutdowns.) See fores —
Unusually calm and cloudy weather led to resurgence in fossil fuel use in 2021
[2.] Since you acknowledge renewables will fail, you invoke “increasingly cheap storage.”
Last time I looked three years ago,battery technologies then didn’t look capable of being scaled to the level and duration of energy storage necessary to provide a reliable backbone to a national grid for weeks or months
Now I don’t know what I don’t know, especially regarding what the Chinese are doing currently. Please feel free to educate me by pointing to some fully plausible studies or evidence — e.g. not wish-lists based on stacked assumptions about the future that renewables activists would like to believe will come true — which show that in 2025 battery technologies have developed to the point where they can support a national grid for weeks or months.
[3.] Finally, you write: ‘The only justification now for nuclear in most grids is… certainly not cost.’
I’m reminded of the neoliberal economist who pointed out that agriculture represented only 2 percent of some nation’s GDP, therefore farming could be handily dispensed with. I’m tempted to say your argument here is that same neoliberal argument applied to energy.
In the end, there are real-world costs and financial costs. The real-world cost of a modern nation-state not having energy security — a 24-hour energy backbone component — far outweigh any conceivable financial costs. Which is why you see China and Russia, among others, developing their nucler industries.
Yep. Batteries won’t scale. I recently looked at the situation in California, where they’ve deployed ~30 GWh of battery grid storage. This is a remarkable milestone, as they’ve finally exceeded the 24 GWh that the single Bath County pumped storage station (located in my neck of the woods) can store. However, they probably need 600 GWh to get through a single 24-hour period of cloudy and windless weather and 10X that to get through an extended period of unfavorable weather. After many years of work, California is less than 1% of where they need to be.
And that’s for temperate California. Things will be even worse farther north and farther from the coasts, where the temperature swings (particular in the winter) can be more extreme and create greater demand.
And regarding costs, you should check out https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/: The top of the list (where prices are highest) is dominated by European countries that have embraced renewables. Consumer prices there run well above $0.30/kWh USD. The US, even with its recent price hikes that have people justifiably complaining, is a relative bargain at $0.18/kWh USD.
See also https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/s-koreas-nuclear-power-at-inflection-point-as-advocate-wins-presidency. Key quote: “Nuclear power cost 61.5 won per kWh, while solar power cost 149.9 won in January according to Korea Power Exchange.” [I tried to find something more recent than 2022, but couldn’t.]
Why is nuclear cheaper than solar in South Korea? Because they figured out how to build nuclear power stations for ~$2500/kW, whereas recent costs in the US and Europe have been 5 or 6 times that. [China and Russia can also build nuclear power stations for ~$2500/kW.]
@ Grumpy Engineer —
Thanks for the data.
“European countries that have embraced renewables. Consumer prices there run well above $0.30/kWh USD.”
Yeah. I’m currently in London.
And it’s $0.37/kWh in the UK.
That’s with 50.4 percent of the UK’s electricity coming from renewables last year—a record high, largely driven by wind power, which alone contributed 29 percent.
And Germany is $0.37/kWh. Deeply stupid politicians going along with Washington on the Ukraine proxy war, then strung out there when that fails and the US pulls back.
“I’m currently in London.”
Ouch. At least in terms of electricity prices, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m in the foothills of Appalachia in the US (a few hours from the east coast), and I paid $0.17/kWh USD on my last bill. And that was after some recent (and big price) hikes that made the news.
Would like to see $0.37/kWh here in Honolulu. And we haven’t fully priced in the impact of post-Lahaina “public safety power shutoffs” and infrastructure fixed costs for the distribution system upgrades mandated by regulation.
Thank you as always for your expert contribution.
The pro nuke argument has always been that we humans are smart–smart enough to make a-bombs–and therefore we can solve nuclear’s problems. But by that same logic we are also smart enough to make better batteries, better solar, better lifestyles. Your practcality argument sounds compelling to me but I’m not an expert on any of this. I do know that in the real world no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Replying to PK: This was my thought- the opportunity cost of a nuclear renaissance is tremendous, both in terms of time and cost. Just looking at Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, it took 18 years to construct & cost around $10 billion. The Flamanville reactor in France cost about $13 billion and construction 12 years over schedule.There are other examples like Vogtle in Georgia where the 4 units cost around $50 billion in 2023 dollars.
Discussions about wrong paths taken 70 years ago IMO amount “whistling past the graveyard” of our current dilemma. The window of opportunity to address the Polycrisis is rapidly slamming shut. Radical conservation and the political strategy(s) to accomplish it is the only discussion worth having.
A major issue with nuclear power is the that it would seem to require a scientifically advanced, safe and stable society to operate properly. Even if you can recycle all the fuel, there are still dangers if the reactors aren’t monitored and maintained properly and constantly.
We don’t live in such a society – we live in one where Nazis take potshots at nuclear reactors and the IAEA looks the other way.
Well it’s a nice expletive pro nuclear rant but doesn’t bother to mention that the infrastructure is failing, the power stations themselves need replacing and are radioactive and it is THIS that causes the ‘recycling’ problems, not just the use of the fuel. Toshiba went bust after failing to fulfill its US contract to decommission US power plants
I add a reference, as there are none in the original post, which seems to be generated using an AI search engine
https://www.nuclearconsult.org/blog/how-french-nuclear-output-has-declined-faster-in-france-than-germany/
https://www.statista.com/topics/6256/nuclear-power-in-france/
Yes, some reactors are more efficient than others but just checking the UK statistics, which has looked at both China and France to upgrade Sizewell and others, it has failed to find a cost effective nuclear solution.
Now we come to the quick to build ‘mini’ reactors. As the rant post notes, the reactors are based on military models but not because of laziness but because the nuclear program is derived from the military, it is not separate from it. The mini reactor will be quick to build because it is a duplicate of the military power plant (of course, there will be problems increasing manufacturing volume, placing the unit and connecting it to the grid – all at taxpayers expense, no risk to the military industry making the units, so much for private enterprise).
You are out of line in depicting a reasonably toned, well argued comment as a “rant” and then further trying to smear Michaelmas as relying on AI as opposed to having existing knowledge. Both are violations of our written site Policies.
And your argument is misleading. Nuclear power production produces waste, FFS. Were you asleep during the freakout during Fukushima over its spent rods, for instance?
It takes all of 30 seconds on a search engine to find statements like:
https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
“There’s no need for any ‘nuclear waste’ to exist.”
Somebody please explain how the above statement doesn’t violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
There is always waste: punto finito. So is the author saying that what’s left after all the uranium’s potential energy has been extracted is no longer radioactive? And how does that work?
Interesting youtube from Kevin, about China and nuclear. Timing works for this thread.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ERK4g_Lm924&pp=4gcKEghzdWJzdGFjaw%3D%3D
Yes,
In this video, and at least one other one recently; he has covered how the chinese are really in a different place than the US.
His other video addressed the cost of electricity, the cost and speed of building power plants, and how the fact that power in china is so much cheaper, and has so much more capacity for generation; that the race for AI, is also not even in the actual ballpark.
The chinese have plenty of energy, they have the capacity to actually realize their AI implementation; whereas the US couldn’t actually triple their energy generation, any time soon, which means these AI mavens are whistling dixie… and just wasting resources so they can “sell” their pipe dream of being at the forefront of AI innovation.
His coverage seemed pretty reasonable. And considering how the AI top 7/10 companies are the bulk of valuation in the american stock market.. and the fact they don’t have the grid they need.. something has to give.
Seems like a con. Given that the US isn’t in the process of getting efficient, or competitive.. we must assume the future will be handled just like the past… one con to the next… someone will cash in.. everyone else will argue about it.
recycling does not get rid of all the waste
Please read with greater care. Michaelmas said nothing of the kind. In fact, he acknowledged that there would still be waste but that what was left could then be rendered harmless using existing technology.
Yes. The proper thing to do is to recycle the used fuel rods to extract the usable uranium, plutonium, and other useful nucleotides and then bury the hazardous remnants deep underground. Like a couple of miles deep using drilling technology from the oil and gas industry.
But instead, we try to bury whole fuel rods less deep underground. The Yucca Mountain repository in the US was cancelled by Obama, but Finland appears to be proceeding with a similar approach: https://group.vattenfall.com/press-and-media/newsroom/2023/finland-to-open-the-worlds-first-final-repository-for-spent-nuclear-fuel.
They’re only burying to a depth of 430 meters (a quarter mile), and despite calling it a “final repository”, it was clearly designed so that they could pull the fuel rods back out if they ever wanted to. And if they’re thinking of eventually recycling them, that’s not a bad idea.
You probably mean “nuclides” instead of “nucleotides”, the latter being biological molecules.
Yes, thank you. Good catch.
Used fuel rods often contain other radioactive isotopes that are useful in applications like smoke detectors and nuclear medicine. And “nuclide” is indeed the right word.
You’re welcome!
Nuclear power plants have near zero greenhouse gas emissions. Good. Nuclear waste is dangerous. Not so good, but manageable. How? spare no expense. Said plants are expensive to build and expensive to dismantle when their useful life is over. Agreed, but if you want it you have to pay up. Even if there was a crash building of nuclear power plants would heating and climate change be affected in the medium term? I doubt it, but is there an alternative that does not require a radical simplification of “life style?” I do not see one and I am not in favor of immiserating the coming generations, which is the path on which we are embarked. I do hope the industries and individuals that denied, down played, and obfuscated the consequences of over heating the entire earth in their pursuit of profit enjoy the consequences of their actions.
(Visible, because there’s another 3 to 8 degrees of warming in the pipeline currently being masked by aerosol particulate release.)
I’m hoping I’m wrong, but my opinion is that this unfortunate reality makes the discussion purely academic.
Was the novel reactor that had a catastrophic cancer-generating aftermath in Simi Valley CA in the late 1950’s early 1960’s a Thorium system? I have looked and can’t seem to get at that detail.
How have we improved on that model, in theory if not in practice?
Not that the US military gives a rat’s bum about ‘aftermath’ and waste for its endeavors, but there are small-scale reactors on subs and big ships. Is the decommissioning ‘plan’ no plan, and the typical, “we are the gubmint/ the military, we can and will do as we please when we please”?
That model certainly will resonate with the Investment Class!
Viz Mr. Gates and his Wyoming forays in the Nuke-o-sphere.
Could we build a low-power-demand magnetic cannon to start reliably shooting the presently accumulated waste into the sun? If the waste has 95-97% utility remaining, can we ship it to NYC, DC, Palo Alto for refining and use?
(Note- the cannon needs to be low- power demand, so we can put every loose electron toward A I, because A I is simply indescribably irresistibly A I. )
Let’s site the reactors in / near the core of major US Cities, starting with DC, NYC, Boston, Seattle, and Palo Alto/ SF Bay area: Might be the only way to assure that they get built, ” as right as possible”.
Let’s for once and for all stop siting in Bumphuc Flyover Country, High Plains, USA.
In this day and age of the here-and-now, planned and functional obsolescence, and seeing Mr. Murphy and his law front and center with all things mechanical that I encounter every day– I am very very skeptical of humans being able to make nukes safe for 300 generations.
BTW, broken record here, but Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us” has a few nice chapters of what happens when humans go ‘poof’ and the mechanical systems we presently tend to and husband are left to their own devices.
Really, none of it matters, we 8 Billions are simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?
And on that note, latest read, I am only the first essay in- excellent! Gary Snyder’s
” The Practice of the Wild”.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1836.The_Practice_of_the_Wild
There are all sorts of different reasons for the different designs. PWR have the least expensive fuel by far.
And PWR are very well understood with gen 3 being solid designs.
Gen 4 get into the area of being able to reuse spent fuel, melt down proof, extremely high heat meaning lots of co uses including onsite storage.
Solar and wind have their place, but in somewhere like the east coast and other highly populated areas with less than good weather, nuclear is a perfect idea. One aspect of solar is the amount of space required. Another for any source is transmission which while easy is expensive and slow to do especially here in the US which makes nuclear that has a slightly higher cost per energy unit over time cheaper to install where its needed than put in thousands of miles of transmission.
I have struggled to accept the notion that the US can’t build big things, but I believe it to be true at this point.
There is no excuse for not being able to build a nuclear plant, on time and budget. There is no excuse for not having full 3D designs to make sure there are no issues in building or operation. Vogal for example had the rebar so close together it couldn’t be built causing lots of delays and redesigns and time lost, I mean how is that possible?
But back to the point of nuclear waste.
Here is a link to a professor who did a lot of videos on energy but talks a lot about nuclear.
here is one on nuclear waste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnxksKmJa6U
“I have struggled to accept the notion that the US can’t build big things, but I believe it to be true at this point.”
Yeah, I’m afraid it’s true. There was some discussion (with you, I now realize) on that subject three days ago: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/09/americas-grid-is-nearing-its-breaking-point.html#comment-4281282.
Here in the US, “big things” must get through multiple environmental impact reviews, both state and federal. Sometimes there are cultural, historic, and economic impact reviews. And then there are the lawsuits. All of this stuff can take years, which is how you can burn more than a decade before construction actually begins. [The Eagle Mountain pumped storage project in California probably won’t start construction until they hit the 21-year mark.] This makes everything more expensive. It increases technical risk, as the original architects of the design will have retired by the time construction actually begins. And it hampers our ability to make changes that are truly necessary.
In China, the government simply says, “Do it.” If anybody objects, they get plowed over. Now I don’t want the US government to ever become as harsh as the Chinese government in terms of ignoring local concerns and running people over, but our current methods (intended to “give everybody a voice”) are simply taking too long. Taking 12, 15, or 21 years to get permission to break ground on critically-needed infrastructure is absurd. We need faster processes.
And in the nuclear world, there are additional regulations that cause delay. I’m working right now on a generator accessory project destined for nuclear. We already have a standard offering, but it does not contain “nuclear-rated” materials everywhere, so we’re having to update hundreds of parts and drawings to use alternate materials that are more expensive and have longer lead times. And from a technical standpoint, they aren’t any better. They’ve simply been through a nuclear-specific certification process instead of a more general power-sector certification process.
And this is for a generator accessory that doesn’t connect to the nuclear reactor at all. It’s on the far side of the steam turbine, where pretty much everything looks like it does in a coal-fired, gas-fired, hydroelectric, or geothermal power station. But the rules are the rules, and we have to use “nuclear-rated” materials everywhere. It’s stupid.
Part of the problem with the cost overruns and time delays is that the US and much of the world no longer has the industrial capacity to manufacture many of the components that new nuclear reactors need anymore such as reactor vessel forgings and so on so we have to sign up for waiting lists for the few countries that can still make such things as the industries that used to make reactor components have largely been shut down since the development of new reactor sites ceased in the 1970s. You would have to get these manufacturing capacities up and running again in addition to streamlining the byzantine reactor approval process that has been put in place ever since the AEC was dissolved and the NRC was created instead.
That being said, Gen IV do have some interesting applications in regards to what can be done with the process heat of some designs such as the production of hydrogen without burning natural gas, and possibly using this to make carbon-neutral synthetic fuels such as dimethyl ether from hydrogen and atmospheric carbon dioxide. Plus, you could hypothetically hook up a nuclear reactor to an urban district-heating system for “free heat” during cold weather.
One of the reasons why many fears of nuclear proliferation in closing the nuclear fuel cycle are unfounded, is that one of the isotopes found in spent nuclear fuel is Plutonium-240. Plutonium-240 is essentially a “bomb poison” because it grabs many of the neutrons you would need to carry out a rapid chain reaction for a nuclear weapon and Plutonium-240 is not fissile. You could hypothetically separate the Pu-240 from the Pu-239, but it would not be an easy task and it would be so much trouble and require so much specialized equipment that nobody has done it. This is why the “Thin Man” project for making a weapon out of spent fuel ended up being a failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_Man_(nuclear_bomb)
If somebody had the means to even try to separate Pu-239 from Pu-240 in spent nuclear fuel, would be much easier to build a dedicated reactor for producing weapons-grade material in the first place.
As an aside, one overlooked area of reactor construction that is quickly becoming an issue, is the lack of reactors that are designed to produce isotopes needed for medical and diagnostic use. There is a severe shortage of some isotopes on the horizon and these are of critical importance to the health and welfare of many people.
I have a difficult time having any faith that the lack of management, engineering and skilled trades can be scraped together in the US to build conventional or small modular NPPs at any scale. Add these to the dearth of facilities to manufacture high performance alloys and fabrication of enormous machines. And that doesn’t begin to address the premise of building out a reprocessing industry from scratch reliant on many of the same inputs. This isn’t the 50s or 60s, if we need more reminders.
While weapon systems are loaded with perverse cost-plus incentives, the challenges of building complex, high performance things on time and within budget are instructive. Because building a huge fleet of modern reactors to consume reprocessed fuel is possible doesn’t mean it can happen. The rot is endemic and to the core.
I recall the UK nuclear industry sabotaging marine renewables in the 80s – Salter’s duck in particular.
We now have the obscenity of an overpriced incomplete new nuclear plant at Hinckley being guaranteed 3x onshore wind pricing just to make it viable being built in the Severn estuary with the 2nd highest tidal range on the planet.
Tidal energy is entirely predictable so suitable for baseload, but barely past commercial proving on the Mey installation.
The biggest problem with nuclear is that it displaces both renewables R&D and better sustainable investment options.
I don’t think there is any ‘existing technology’ which can clean up the nuclear cess-pit the industry left behind in Hartford, WA. So it is left to fester. Same for Fukushima. Same for Chernobyl, beneath its concrete dome.
And if these new nuclear techs are so safe, will AIG or State Farm step up to insure them? No private company will insure a PWR. So, as usual, the taxpayer will end up footing an unguessable bill, if/when something goes wrong.
It seems to me that the basic issue with nuclear power is the inability to meaningfully experiment or push the envelope. Whether it’s concerns about meltdowns or weapons proliferation, the general tendency is towards extremely conservative system designs. While the weapons concerns are ultimately a political problem (and is only solvable as such), I think the concerns about physical safety are probably possible to overcome. The basic requirement would basically be some sort of facility where it is possible to safely build and test reactors to failure. That means intentionally pushing them to meltdown, so that the process can actually be studied outside of risk averse modeling. This also grants the opportunity to simplify overbuilt safety systems, while in principle improving safety. Perhaps we could even come up with designs with which meltdowns are allowable.
Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me
The Gen 4 reactors all have at their foundation of design that they cannot melt down. They have some different designs about how to do this.
But we don’t need to test to melt down, the answer is designs that cannot melt down due to physics.
For example pebble bed molten salt reactors. If they get too hot, they stop fissioning due to the physics of the physical design. Not with active pumps etc but purely passive physics.
That is the direction we should work towards. Also they can use spent fuel as their fuel source which uses up about 95% of the active material vs PWR which only use about 3-5%.
Great piece by Yves and Michaelmas. I’m mostly ignorant about these issues, though I’ve heard that nuclear has some carbon emission problems that come from the actual building of the infrastructure (i.e. tons upon tons of concrete and steel), which make it less and less feasible as emissions have to be cut off ASAP (though, to be fair, this is probably a problem with solar and wind as well).
The more important part, in my view, is what Yves pointed out:
(Electrical) Energy is of course perhaps the most important factor to maintain a functioning economy in the short term. But no amount of energy can overcome fishery collapse, soil degradation, insect dieoffs, etc. Though understandable, the historical focus on climate disaster on account of carbon emissions kind of missed the point: it is only one of the factors of disaster (no doubt primus inter pares); solving it merely passes the buck to the next imminent catastrophe.
I found the piece interesting until I read this passage:
“Let’s suppose, specifically, that the world as a whole had moved to nuclear power along the model France implemented in the 1970s.”
If that had happened the world would be in the same situation as France is today. They don’t have the money to replace the reactors and if they try, the result is financially disastrous. See this article in the german weekly Focus from January 18, 2025 (link below, machine translation), which points to a report of the official French Court of Auditors about the most modern french nuclear plant (went online December 2024). The essence of the report can be condensed to the fact that the costs of the construction of the plant demands a price of 12 cent per kilowatt-hour, but the market price currently is at 4 cent per kilowatt-hour.
And as Alex Cox has noted no insurance company is willing to take the full risk. In Switzerland they had to legally limit the liability of the electriciity companies with nuclear power plants to 200 mn Swiss Francs and the rest of the risk bears as usual the taxpayer.
Teddy Light: the market price currently is at 4 cent per kilowatt-hour.
Simply not true in the real world. Here are current spot prices across Europe — https://www.energyprices.eu/
Average hovers around €0.06–€0.09/kWh, or 6.5–9.8 US cents/kWh, depending on the day and region.
For best case scenarios with onshore wind in Europe: yes, between 4– 6 cents kWh, and for solar 2.5 – 5.0 cents. But that’s renewables, region-dependent, and intermittent
So in the real world where does your grid get its baseload 24/7 power come from? Because if it won’t be nuclear, it’s going to be fossil fuel. Probably gas.
Current German price per kWh for gas averages 11-13 cents, Netherlands 12-14, Italy is 10-12.
More here — https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/energy-prices-europe
And look at this. Top 3 countries with highest energy costs . This is how bad losing cheap Russian gas has been for Europe since 2021.
1. Estonia
In September 2022, Estonia hit new record high prices for both electricity, which rose to €0.59 per kilowatt-hour (KWh), and for natural gas, which rose to €0.38/KWh. Since early 2021 to September 2022, the price for electricity and natural gas rose 353% and a staggering 773% respectively.
2. Netherlands
In October 2022, the Netherlands household prices for electricity were the third highest in Europe at €0.67/KWh, 52% higher compared to the European average. Household gas prices were the highest in Europe, at €0.42/KWh. This is 78% higher compared to the European average price for gas.
3. Italy
Electricity prices in Italy rose 30% between September and October 2022 to the second highest prices for household electricity in Europe, the highest when adjusted to purchasing power standards (PPS), at €0.70 KW/h …Compared to the European average, the price for electricity and gas sit 39% and 84% higher respectively.
I took the 4 cents/kWh from the report dating from January 2025 I mentioned, but I forgot to add that it is the price for large companies with huge consumption. Anyway the average price you indicated €0.06–€0.09/kWh corroborates the point I wanted to make that the price needed to cover the costs of the newly built nuclear power plant in France is out of reach.
Teddy Light: I forgot to add that it is the price for large companies with huge consumption.
[1] Sure. Again, where does the baseline 24-7 power component of your grid come from? It’s either fossil fuels or nuclear.
[2] Rolls-Royce claims their SMRs will deliver at 6 cents kWh, competitive with wind and solar.
https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/press/british-small-nuclear-plants-can-deliver-low-cost-low-carbon-electricity
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/analysis/featuresmr-could-achieve-60mwh-say-rolls-royce-et-al-5961220/
Sure, we recall ‘electricity to cheap to meter’, blah, blah. So we’ll see. But I find Rolls-Royce’s claims more plausible currently than that new battery technologies will emerge that’ll scale sufficiently for mass energy storage for weeks or months for a national grid.