Google to back three new nuclear projects

Corporate equivalent of acting like a douchebag who constantly makes up imaginary stories about how cool they are to distract from them being a complete loser.

The long de-fueled reactor vessel was removed just last year.[1] Sent to Texas as a final resting place. The containment dome was still in place then. The next step is to restore the Vallecitos complex to "conditions suitable for productive reuse for other commercial or industrial purposes."[2]

So that's the aftermath of the first commercial small nuclear power reactor.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Vallecitos-react...

[2] https://www.northstar.com/northstar-closes-ge-hitachi-vallec...

Fukishima containment.[1] The top of the containment vessel is shown in yellow, just above the red cylinder containing the reactor. The containment vessel was a heavy shell, but not much larger than the reactor. It had to contain any steam overpressure resulting from an accident, and didn't have enough volume that the steam pressure would decrease, and maybe condense. The surrounding building wasn't a pressure vessel and couldn't contain anything. Building panels blew out, leaving visible holes in the walls.

Three Mile Island containment.[2] The entire huge concrete and steel building around the reactor and support equipment is the containment vessel. When the reactor failed, radioactive steam escaped into the large containment vessel, where it was contained.

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/appendices/fuk...

[2] https://www.ans.org/news/article-3916/the-three-mile-island-...

You wouldn’t call Fukushima a large disaster?

The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.

I don't think that's an accurate depiction of NRC for builds like at Georgia's Vogtle. Even in California, entire reactors have been installed backwards and the regulatory problems were not the big problem.

Given that France's builds in both Finland and France itself have been similarly disastrous as the US builds, I don't think the NRC seems to be the likely cause. And France is much better at building big things than the US is, their infrastructure costs are a fraction of US costs. IMHO there's something deeper to the lack of success of nuclear as a technology. It's a mainframe trying to compete in the cloud era.

Do you have a source?

Well, no, capital expenditures can create future profit. Emphasis on _can_ and _future_.

Those costs include grid fees?

Grid fees pay for damage caused by wildfires.

I'm not sure excatly what you mean by "that problem," but economic might means having the ability to maintain massive infrastructure in sparsely populated, difficult terrain. It means paying massive amounts of money to inspect, clear brush, and replace 100 year old equipment piecemeal.

Additionally, that economic might means that we have very high labor costs, and the ways of fixing things that are cheapest may be different for California than other parts of the country. But the utility is incentivized to spend as much as possible on these efforts (they take a fixed percentage of costs as profit), and the regulators have no clue what's going on. So proposing a method that's the cheapest elsewhere will get a rubber stamp.

You understand there are multiple types of regulation, right? The deregulation you're referring to was with respect to generators being able to sell into the grid.

The relevant regulation here is the state-backed guarantees on returns for pge under authority of CPUC. CPUC approves basically any rate increases pge approves. It doesn't need to do this. It could hold pge accountable based on what they determine qualifies as operating expenses vs. infrastructure improvements. PGE wants everything to count as infrastructure improvement because they're guaranteed a rate of return on infrastructure projects.

Obviously it's difficult to determine what "infrastructure improvements" were actually due to poor management and maintenance vs. what infrastructure improvements are required purely to meet demand (for example) or from "normal wear and tear".

It's hard to reconcile 1) the fact that there's pretty broad consensus that PGE fucked up and didn't fulfill its obligations, especially maintenance and 2) reporting record profits. Clearly there's something wrong with the system, particularly the CPUC-utility relationship. AKA, regulation.

Wow no regulations in California. First I’m hearing of this

Wow no regulations in California. First I’m hearing of this

The AP1000 was a new design when Vogtle 3 and 4 were planned. It was certified by the NRC in 2005. NuScale had its small modular reactor design certified by the NRC just a couple of years ago:

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-sm...

If you mean that the NRC holds back designs that are more exotic than plain old light water reactors, maybe so, but that isn't relevant to the "looming power crisis" mentioned by bpodgursky up-thread. Light water reactors are the most affordable and fastest to build everywhere in the world. Pressurized heavy water reactors (like CANDU) are also mature designs. Everything else is slower and more expensive to build, with very limited operational history compared to the dominant water based reactor designs.

Not to be too simple about it, but this does happen every night. We already require (and achieve) sufficient grid diversification, without batteries and all the cool stuff coming in future.

I am not against nuclear, but I do believe we would be fine without it too.

And hackers can’t beat air gaps

https://www.missionsecure.com/blog/cyber-attack-india-larges...

The Iranian nuclear program was also air gapped.

Didn’t stop Stuxnet.

It’s interesting what you can do with USB drives.

And more power plants means more possibilities for human errors.

By sheer numbers, yes, but the kinds of birds killed are different. Larger, slower reproducing birds such as eagles, condors, etc. are more at risk being killed by wind turbines because deaths in those groups have a much larger effect whereas cats kill a much larger number of birds but they tend to be smaller, faster reproducing species and as such their numbers overall aren't as much at risk.

> Cats cause ~1000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.

Edit: this should be Cats cause ~10,000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.

There’s plenty meat eaters that care of birds for multiple reasons and perceive their diminution as an issue. One of them might be other animal (that they care less) regulation, like mosquitos and mouses. Another one is the delight to see them flying and singing around. And another one: seeds dispersions that contribute to the flora health.

That just isn't a real problem. A single large American landfill could take 100 years worth of wind turbine blades and not even be 25% full. If we were so inclined, we could also shred them and add them to concrete for sidewalks or the like.

Recyclable blades are gaining traction: RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...

There even are efforts to recycle existing ones: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-che...

In most advanced nations landfilling them is prohibited, and many are now burnt in cement kilns.

So what? Even if every wind turbine blade were landfilled it would add only slightly to waste streams already in existence.

The US produces hundreds of millions of tons of construction and demolition waste per year.

Mostly people falling of roofs I think. When you have lowest bid contractors going up and down millions roofs each for a measly 10kw of power. The aggregate deaths per kw are worse for residential than other power sources.

I think this is actually backwards. The reactors are build big to get economies of scale. Building 4 small ones, each of which will also go over budget, only to produce a more expensive product out of each (electricity) puts your economics backwards.

Is that competitive compared to solar/wind + battery? I doubt it.

So you claim that and that one "paper" from 2019 calculating worst case and with 2019 battery prices. Bad thing is battery prices are falling through the floor and 6 years make all the difference.

Please get your prices to 2025.

We can pursue high energy intensive activities with renewables, higher than if we use fusion.

On Earth, solar allows high energy use before we run into limits from direct thermal pollution, since it uses energy already hitting the planet rather than introducing new energy.

In space, the energy available from sunlight vastly exceeds any available from fusion, and the feasibility difference tilts even more toward solar.

For mobility in space, beamed power will be best, and solar works with that just fine, even out to interstellar distances.

Life spans of reactors can cause instability. Nuclear requires unstable mines for unstable materials which are unstably finite. Controlled by unstable governments and where by a nuclear explosion causes a very unstable aftermath. I see nothing stable about nuclear.

Unless, you mean renewable being "unstable" in the sense of no wind, no sun equates to no power. Then yes, but only until the fuel is spent.

However, renewables are stable when resources are available, stable in providing consistent clean fuel and stable in cost on upkeep than say one of a nuclear reactor.

Which is why you combine all three.

> Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.

El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, holds a unique distinction as the only island to operate solely on wind and waterpower for 28 consecutive days.

The facility ingeniously combines wind generation with pumped storage hydroelectric generation. Now that's cool.

https://www.renewableinstitute.org/el-hierro-a-renewable-ene...

I do know it. And I know that the intermittency can be dealt with at finite and tolerable cost, and the resulting solutions are likely to be cheaper than those using nuclear power.

Those seemingly stuck on advocating nuclear power do not seem to understand the advances made both in storage technology and in system design to deal with intermittency.

> To be fair, Chernobyl was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today.

That's not fair.

Chernobyl was a reactor that failed to pass safety tests being put into production. Any failure should be considered expected.

On the other hand, assuming the industry doesn't completely stagnate, "X was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today" will always be true.

I'm not worried about another Chernobyl. We've had one already, all reactor designs have been tested over and over again to avoid a repeat. The real risk is in all the small and seemingly insignificant things working together in unexpected ways. There will always be a nonzero chance of an incident, and due to the nature of nuclear reactors the impact of an incident is essentially unlimited.

Think of it like commercial airliners. Are they safe? Yes, absolutely. They are the safest method of travel available. I have zero worry about my safety when stepping on an airplane. But despite the tiny odds airplanes do crash from time to time, simply because there are so many of them.

An airplane crash has a smouldering crater and a few hundred dead as its result. Not great, but not terrible either: as a society we build a monument and move on. Would we still be flying airplanes if - no matter how unlikely - a crash meant that an entire city would become uninhabitable?

> Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit there. They do not require active cooling.

The same was said of Fukushima. And it was - until a tsunami fried all the backup local power keeping the control systems alive. Turns out the "passive cooling" still requires some valves to be controllable...

Hacks, cyber espionage?

So it sounds like the view point of "deal with it when it happens then" and that's what puts me off nuclear.

Nuclear is too unstable when something does occur to be contained and as to when dismantled.

It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen. Instead we had yesterday in Sweden news the opening of a freshly new built natural gas power plant as the solution to that intermittence problem. Of course, those natural gas power plants are paid through subsidizes as grid stability is the government responsibility, and thus the bill for that natural gas is put on taxes and connection fees.

I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places like europe, you first have to stop investing and building new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled. If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.

Renewable power is cheap because it also receives massive government handouts in the form of tax credits.

Are you really denying the learning curve based on one paper about France? You don't think maybe there's other confounding factors*? A single survey of a single country isn't counterfactual. Are you really certain that with a relatively fixed design the learning curve wouldn't apply at sufficient scale, all else being equal. The learning curve is one of the most time-tested laws in construction.

*Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so many possible explanations for the observed negative curve that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve theory doesn't hold in nuclear.

In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met. (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many facilities of the same design were actually built.)

-Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There were lots of changes in French design

-Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps where the workforce either respecializes in another field or retires.

- regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal".

-while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this, labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was growing pretty quickly during the French build out

For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier to get an effective negative learning rate. With so many confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the theory is just wrong in an entire industry.

The whole argument is like going back 40 years and claiming there’s no point thinking about deploying nor researching & developing solar / wind because we don’t have the expertise nor technology.

We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either.

Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base.

And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper.

AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear.

CSIRO perfidy.

Conversely China has built a lot of new nuclear capacity, and has projects for SMRs in the works too.

The problem as you allude to isn't the technology.

Explaine how nuclear waste is dealt with.

Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades which are entirely waste with no recycling value.

Hint: it isn’t.

There’s so little of it, it’s still all predominantly stored on site at the power plants.

Highly radioactive reactive waste isn’t highly reactive for very long. And long lasting waste isn’t very reactive at all. Vitrified it’s chemically non-reactive.

> Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more.

no, these are included in the calculations of "deaths per kilowatt-hour"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

> the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem

No it's not unsolved. There are burial sites. The spent fuel is kept on the power plant for years so it cools down.

Also even without nuclear power, there would still be nuclear waste to take care of because of the medical, defence, research, and other industries.

> Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, [...]

Nope, it's all included, how could it not be?

> Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up

Yep, yet it's still the safest, which means your argument has to be wrong.

Just to show you the magnitude of your error, the Fukushima accident was directly caused by a tsunami which killed 20,000 people. But your main concern from that event is the cost of cleanup of radioactive material.

More people die from falling off roofs while installing solar panels than from nuclear accidents.

> but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.

Well you're not technically wrong. As you've inadvertently demonstrated with your irrational arguments, since people didn't use reason to arrive at their conclusions, they would not be likely to be persuaded by it.

> Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.

Do you mean to say the waste is significantly worse than for solar panels, wind turbines, etc.?

> Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem.

Inert solid waste sitting in a barrel somewhere is not a problem that is worth talking about.

Again, the magnitude of your error is outstanding. We've been simply releasing all the, radioactive mind you, products of burning coal into the atmosphere for the past few hundreds of years but you're concerned about a tiny amount of solid waste.

> > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs

>

> We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example.

You cherry-picked the single country with the biggest share of nuclear by far.

> > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved

>

> We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.

Ironically, that's because the standards for nuclear plant safety are determined by the sort of irrational thinking you're presenting here.

> Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity.

And that's where the issue is buried, I don't believe you're taking all costs into account.

Is coal really cheaper when you include the health and environmental damage it creates? It literally can't be, the costs of human created climate change will be eye-watering.

Are renewables really cheaper once you consider the end goal of a 90%+ renewable grid? The costs of accounting for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind go up exponentially as you increase the share of renewables in the grid.

Adding the first 10% of renewables is trivial, you need no extra storage since the grid itself will simply absorb the difference.

Adding the last 10% is horribly expensive and I don't believe you're accounting for that at all.

The issue is renewables are not a complete solution no matter how good it feelz

Not in any realistic sense. This report

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...

just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night.

So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an electric space heater in late April or otherwise your chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't get taken seriously.

The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of weather.

I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of blackout a year can people tolerate?")

With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that you could do something useful with the extra power but it is easier said than done because "free" power from renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low enough that you're not going to worry about the economics of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from them.)

For the farmer that owns the land the windmill got built on it's great. The handful of houses in the area get fuck all though and actually have to deal with the externalities.

Usually what happens is they buy out one local government, pay them, and usually fuck up the neighbors as the local government being paid not only has the incentive of money but can say put that hazardous facility just at the circumvention to their neighboring places, which get 0.

Its not about "new" vs "old" designs. Cooling towers have been a feature for decades, which those french nuclear power plants just didn't have before, because it wasn't necessary yet. Thanks to climate change it now is.

Also it isn't as bad as it sounds. They had to throttle some nuclear power plants slightly. This lead to a loss of less than 0.2% of the total 2022 nuclear generation in france.

That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?"

If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1]

So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One

which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably.

[1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME

> Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity.

I just don't know if that assumption is true.

Looking at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/small-modular-reactor...

> The timeline is to finish construction of the first reactor by the end of 2029, and connect it to the grid in 2030.

Sure, let's add 100% buffer because it's a major project, that's between 8-10 years from now. Not bad.

Are we talking about different kinds of reactors maybe?

Yeah, I would say of the organizations in the world that care about power outages, Google would rank among those most prepared to deal with them and the least flustered when they happen. If it has been too long between power outages Google will cause one intentionally, as an exercise.

The last time France had a blackout on the scale of Spain and Portugal was 1978. France has been and remains one of the top electricity exporters for Western Europe.

Because of nuclear.

By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression.

Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia? France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion engines from their largest city by 2030? France.

Because of nuclear.

Misleading I’d say

> Residents of Andorra and parts of France bordering Spain were also reporting being hit by the blackout.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...

Think 20% power cost, 80% infrastructure where most are fixed cost.

Roof top solar doesn’t work in apartments, and it also doesn’t work for renters.

Roof top solar is great for people with spare cash to optimise heir future cash flow.

I advocate for nuclear because it guarantees the poor won’t freeze in the dark.

In most places home rooftop solar systems are heavily subsidized by everyone else. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much further than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar.

As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If it wasn't for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 122 and 284 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...

We're weird because we want a proven power supply to be built and used? Are the French really that much more capable than the USA that we can't replicate or surpass what they've done in their country with nuclear?

What nuclear proliferation?

How many nuclear electricity states are there? 30

How many nuclear weapons states are there? 9

What headaches are those nine nuclear capable states providing, exactly?

How has the world been made worse by having nine nuclear capable states? Practically, not just hypothetical anxieties about an unrealised future.

Let's ask people what the correct number of nuclear plants that should be built to decarbonize Iran is.

That's happening anyway.

Intermittence is a solved problem with storage, and storage is being deployed at an absolutely massive scale on grids that are market-driven for profits, namely Texas.

Yes? That was half a century ago. The equivalent choice in 2025 is renewables with storage.

Today they are wholly unable to build new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.

Their EPR2 program is also in absolute shambles continually being pushed into the future while revising up the costs.

Now hopefully targeting investment decision in mid 2026 and the first new reactor online by 2038.

Until 2038 we should of course stop decarbonizing. No point reducing the area under the curve.

Many countries are rolling out TWhs per capita of renewable generation faster than France did at its peak of nuclear rollout.

It was impressive, but it's been overshadowed by modern renewables.

Nuclear ELECTRICITY, not 'energy'!

In France about 60% of final energy is produced thanks to fossil fuel.

Moreover the cost of this 'nuclearization' was huge (France debt is abyssal, and taxes are very high)

Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...

Profit is tied to the subsidies, so that statement by the CEO is meaningless.

When you say nuclear was never cheap, what are you comparing it to? The impossible to compete with subsidization of coal plants? How can you compete with plants that are allowed to dump toxic radioactive waste into the atmosphere that kills hundreds of thousands annually, but your plants have to go through regulatory hell to prove they're 99.99999999% safe before even being approved?

You ever notice how "green parties" are somehow so incredibly effective against nuclear and not effective against fossil fuels?

Why do you think that is? Somehow I'm not convinced its the activism holding nuclear back.

Green Parties are such a farce for the most part. They serve other purposes, not aligned with what you really want or defend ;)

Reminder that anti-nuclear activism started against nuclear weapons and nuclear dumping, and then after Chernobyl the realization that it was possible to mess up agriculture across a continent from the failure of a single plant. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-36112372

Greenpeace spent years campaigning against dumping waste at sea.

In a reasonably free market, which doesn't exist for electricity, solar would win handily.. but this is after decades of subsidized development and incremental improvement by Chinese wafer factories.

This seems to be working backward from having decided that we must handout untold trillions to the comparatively insignificant nuclear industry.

In 2024 we, as in globally, completed about 5 GW of new built nuclear.

Let’s compare to renewables:

- 600 GW solar PV added [1]

- 117 GW wind power [2]

- ~100 GW battery storage

Even when adjusting for TWh the disparity is absolutely enormous. We’re talking a ~50x differences and it is only getting larger as renewables continue to scale.

But somehow the only technology which is ”scalable” is new built nuclear power.

[1]: https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-w...

[2]: https://www.gwec.net/gwec-news/wind-industry-installs-record...

Yes, we need a massive increase in the supply of energy. Solar is the only way we're going to get it. We're adding solar at a 1TW / year rate. We're adding nuclear at a rate of ~30 GW / year.

State capacity is a real problem. Often struggling to do even one thing. There's many places where companies are ready to go on renewables but the grid approval isn't.

People overlook how long nuclear takes to build. Hinkley Point C is approaching a decade.