Not sure why you're restricting yourself to only solar and batteries in northern european climate.
We also have, wind, firming and you know. Relying on fossil fuels for the once a decade emergency.
There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test when we still have agriculture, aviation, shipping, construction, chemicals, heavy industry and so on to decarbonize.
System studies from Australia to Denmark are converging on finding that new nuclear makes the system vastly more expensive. Even when assuming your "NOAK" costs. Because no one would be stupid enough to build new nuclear at Vogtle or Flamanville prices.
Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability. It always relied on fossil fuels to solve the hard times.
You raise the floor, but that's quite meaningless when the hard times are far far above the yearly baseload requirement. Even when factoring in scheduling maintenance around it. And theen adding that your nuclear fleet may be like the Swedish or French one and have half the capacity offline when it is needed.
Given that you've carved out the "realistic" exception for yourself I now presume you will keep shifting goalposts. But I digress.
System costs have been the central argument against renewables ever since they became competitive on LCOE. Which is why energy-system researchers have spent years developing, validating, and publishing models that account for hourly balancing, storage, transmission, flexibility, and sector coupling.
From Denmark to Australia system cost studies find renewable energy systems vastly cheaper than if involving new nuclear. Even when sensitivity testing very low nuclear costs.
The problem with nuclear is that it still needs the same firming to match an actual grid load. It still needs storage and gas turbines.
A smaller quantity than for renewable grids sure. But given how expensive new nuclear is it doesn't matter in the end.
Your final comment conflates dispatchability with operational flexibility.
Nuclear output is controllable, and French reactors load follow. Although using a fleet controlling which reactor takes which day, and managing their fueling cycle so they can do it.
Conventional nuclear plants are economically optimized for high utilization, cannot start from shutdown on short notice, and don't eliminate the need for capacity that can respond to sudden shortages, demand peaks, and unexpected outages.
There is a significant difference between supplying dependable energy throughout the year and economically covering the relatively few hours when residual demand becomes exceptionally high.
> How many hundreds of billions in subsidies and decades wasted until we reach "NOAK with an experienced workforce and robust supply chain"
None. Nuclear is cheap and quick and investments in nuclear not wasted.
We have wasted decades going down the wrong path. As an example, Germany has spent almost 25 years on the failed "Energiewende" and we haven't even completed the easy half. Nuclear did not require subsidies. Intermitten renewables anywhere from €30-50 billion just in subsidies. Per year.
France converted its electricity grid to nuclear in 15 years. For a total of €228 billion in 2011 money. Not "per year", not "subsidies". But total investment.
This does not seem at all grounded in reality? Just all around misinfomration.
The existing French nuclear fleet was built with enormous state support. Germany pays €18B in EEG support. And that is decreasing as old extremely expensive renewables are leaving the problem.
What you are doing is crying about late 2000s and early 2010s renewables being expensive. Let me ask you, what relevance does that have in 2026? We don't pay those prices today.
The reality in 2026 is the outcome of Flamanville 3, Vogtle, Hinkley point C. Then we have modern projects, and proposed subsidies like:
- Darlington SMR: Close to Vogtle
- Polish AP1000: Vogtle like
- Czech APR1000: A step below Vogtle.
- French EPR2 fleet: Absolutely insane at €100 per MWh and interest free loans alreay assuming large learning effects.
And that is before the usual timeline and budget overruns for new nuclear has happened.
Given this reply it seems like you are straying farther reality since the prospect of new nuclear is crumbling. You're not even presenting a logically sound argument. Its just victim complex and dreaming about times past.
Much earlier. The early nuclear industry, which was shared military and civilian, was incredibly nasty. While also covering up issues. Leaving us with enormous clean up bills to this date.
Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.
The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.
With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.
The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.
What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.
But not anywhere near the nuclear frenzy seen online.
Hanford could be handled for far less (no idea about the UK's sites but probably the same situation). Its the result of making the atomic bombs during WWII. The acids could be neutralized and the uranium separated out. However, a contract that just keeps putting the material in new containers every few years is much more profitable. The idea it should take hundreds of billions to do is pretty much about an nearly infinite time horizon of maintenance instead of just cleaning up the site.
Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.
Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.
PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.
This revisionist history about military and civilian nuclear being two completely different spheres is getting tiresome.
They were deeply entwined, and still are. The AEC established in 1946 was responsible for both nuclear weaposn and peaceful nuclear technology.
There's been a bunch of civilian dual purpose reactors ran at hanford.
Yes. Much of the waste is from the weapons program. But saying that the site has nothing to do with civilian nuclear plants is just you making stuff up.
It is sad when the premier example touted is South Korea. The country where 68 people received prison sentences totaling 253 years and 9 months from the corruption scandal involving falsified safety certificates, fraudulent components and bribery.
China is also especially funny. Despite the nuke bros perfect environment of stable regulations, cheap workforce, state financing, authoritarian rule and so on nuclear remains insignificant. Sitting at 4% of the grid mix and shrinking. While renewables and storage are absolutely exploding in scale.
I think "baseload" has almost lost its meaning in these discussions.
Renewables have been displacing traditional baseload generation for years. What grids actually need is reliable dispatchable capacity, peaking power and firming.
People keep bringing up winter cold spells and claiming we need "baseload" to handle them, apparently without realizing that nuclear never solved those demand peaks either.
Historically that's been the job of dispatchable generation.
Which means new nuclear is about the worst thing we can spend our limited resources on since it won't be coming online until the 2040s, and then at a ruinosuly expensive price.
Meanwhile renewables and storage are reshaping our global energy system due to being the cheapest globally scalable energy source in human history.
We also need to keep in mind nuclear supply chains. After 21 sanction packages the EU still haven't sanctioned Russia's nuclear industry.
We're simply too deeply entangled across the entire supply chain: nuclear fuel, enrichment, reprocessing, technological partnerships, reactor maintenance, new construction and more.
No this is misinformation that continues to be spread.
The Iberian blackout was caused by a lack of reactive power leading to voltages going out of their designed ranges.
The Iberian grid had adequate inertia at the time.
Reasonable grids have forced inverter based generation to manage reactive power for over a decade. But Spain due to lackluster processes relied on thermal plants to provide it. And they didn’t provide the expected amount.
There were some more confounders around oscillations and what not but the central cause came down to voltage control. Which is near trivial to solve in 2026. If you just force everyone to do it.
I'll look into this further. I heard about this from a podcast episode on The Great Simplification, I'd be very surprised if it turned out to be misinformation though its always possible. Nate is pretty damn thorough in his research and sits squarely on the left half of the political spectrum, I'd usually expect misinformation like this to come from the (US) right.
> The investigation concludes that the blackout resulted from a combination of many interacting factors, including oscillations, gaps in voltage and reactive power control, differences in voltage regulation practices, rapid output reductions and generator disconnections in Spain, and uneven stabilisation capabilities. These factors led to fast increases of voltage and cascading generation disconnections in Spain, resulting in the blackout in continental Spain and Portugal.
It even models scenarios where they double and triple the available inertia to see if it would have had any effect:
> The above analyses indicate that, even under the assumption of perfect execution of defence plan actions, neither these measures nor additional inertia would have been sufficient to prevent system collapse.
Here's the US regulation from 2016:
> As a result, all newly interconnecting non-synchronous generators will be required to provide reactive power
That is ancillary services. And where all battery implementations started before saturating those marketss.
We've now past that and batteries are actively killing the business case for fossil gas peakers while renewables are doing the same for legacy thermal producers.
Why is it irrelevant? There has been recent research on just this question. It is still in its infancy with simplified models but their findings suggest that as grids decarbonize, storage will increasingly take over the price setting role traditionally played by conventional generators.
The new merit order: The viability of energy-only electricity markets with only intermittent renewable energy sources and grid-scale storage
We also have, wind, firming and you know. Relying on fossil fuels for the once a decade emergency.
There's no point having the grid be an ideological purity test when we still have agriculture, aviation, shipping, construction, chemicals, heavy industry and so on to decarbonize.
System studies from Australia to Denmark are converging on finding that new nuclear makes the system vastly more expensive. Even when assuming your "NOAK" costs. Because no one would be stupid enough to build new nuclear at Vogtle or Flamanville prices.
Because the problem for nuclear is that it never solved dispatchability. It always relied on fossil fuels to solve the hard times.
You raise the floor, but that's quite meaningless when the hard times are far far above the yearly baseload requirement. Even when factoring in scheduling maintenance around it. And theen adding that your nuclear fleet may be like the Swedish or French one and have half the capacity offline when it is needed.
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