Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants • Hacker News Board

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#251

Post by Perseids » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

Kipters wrote: post #119

Arodex wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries. You even have the industrial prowess to make it all in the country step by step, whereas nuclear reactors are such humongous engineering projects that building the capacity is very out of reach. Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how a…

Why not both? We still need rotating mass to keep the grid stable, which means either building giant flywheels, keep burning gas or bring nuclear into the mix. One of these can also produce a ton of energy when needed, the other two cant. We can and should build more renewables, but we can't risk grid stability!

And as a third answer: You actually don't need to take the flywheels of the power plants offline, when you take the rest of the power plant down. The locations for them are perfect, as the whole grid has historically been build around them.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#252

Post by palata » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #183

rayiner wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies. If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the econom…

Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades. Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal. But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.

> Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.

No need to run the world: in the last decades, some environmentalists have been lobbying against nuclear energy and in the end, the people in many countries have become opposed to it by fear of it. And that feared is fuelled (among others) by environmentalists for sure.

> Nuclear has never been financially viable

If it's about comparing energies financially (and many other dimensions actually), nothing gets remotely close to oil. But oil is limited and oil is destroying the world.

Also not to forget: everything nowadays depends on globalisation and therefore oil. We like to compare renewables to oil, but we forget that they totally depend on oil at the moment. Without oil, we don't build much renewables anywhere. So an important question is: without oil, do we need nuclear energy or not? I believe we do. I believe we also need renewables, to be clear.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#253

Post by bryanlarsen » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

sharpneli wrote: post #247

thomasmg wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.

Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that. There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter. What should one do then? Just shut everything down?

Solar produces power even on cloudy days. So the simple answer is you overbuild solar to produce enough power even on cloudy days.

That requires about a 10x overbuild. In reality you do about a 3x overbuild, exporting to the cloudy places in the rest of Europe when you are cloudy and importing from the sunny places when you are cloudy. It's sometimes cloudy in most of Europe but it's never cloudy in all of Europe.

Then you do a similar thing with wind. Wind and solar are anti-correlated.

You can also make it easier by not shutting down existing nuclear. New nuclear is horribly expensive, but keeping existing plants running is cost effective.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#254

Post by eimrine » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:59 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #198

nxy wrote: post #194

Whether people like it or not, nuclear power is the path forward for the foreseeable future; at least until nuclear fusion becomes a reality. With incoming AI/automation, ya’ll need all the power ya can get.

Yeah what the hell, I want tiny and small nuke-batteries so we can finally get cars and phones that doesn't need charging anymore, would solve a lot of problems and surely won't introduce any new ones.

What you really need is 24/7 power supply, it might become a luxury to have uninterrupted electricity exactly as it is a luxury to have enough of fresh water.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#255

Post by p1mrx » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

lopis wrote: post #166

Gud wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland is not in the EU.

While it's not part of the EU as a member, Switzerland is quite literally in the EU.

You can escape Switzerland by going straight up into space. It's only "in" the EU in 2 dimensions, maybe 2.5 since you can't dig your way out.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#256

Post by bryanlarsen » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #168

bryanlarsen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Baseload" is load , not generation. It's not necessary -- for example the small northern grids that only have diesel generators operate fine even though they have no generators that don't have the capacity for quick cycling. Baseload was a cost optimization. Back in the day it was cheaper to build coal & nuclear plants that took days to power on. Somebody figured out that if a grid was built of a mix of those cheape…

> Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it need not be. In this case, China is building coal plants to address the baseload that doesn’t go away at night when the solar isn’t producing.

Note that China has started building battery banks at massive scale recently.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#257

Post by palata » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #189

Gud wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap? They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.

1. Nuclear has a negative learning curve. It’s gotten more expensive with time. Part of the reason is increasing geopolitical risks (the U.S. just launched a war on Iran because of the possibility it may upgrade nuclear material to weapon capabilities), lost knowledge and expertise, and also the increasing relative cost of financing in the cost of energy projects. 2. Nuclear was built at a time when governments were…

> given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten

In a world with a lot of oil. How does that evolve when we don't have enough oil anymore?

Feels like renewables are extremely distributed, which sounds like it may be harder to manage without the happy globalisation brought by accessible oil.

To be clear, I believe we also need renewables. But I also believe that we won't remotely replace oil, so we need absolutely everything we can imagine, and that includes nuclear energy.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#258

Post by 15155 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #163

lightedman wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"SMR make as much sense as space datacenters." So a whole lot of sense given the entire US Navy uses them and I already have one datacenter operating up in space (small test unit that over 3 months has provided ZERO issues) and a bigger one heading up into orbit next year when it's done being made. "but you can't gaslight thermodynamics" No but you can certainly conflate them like you're doing right now.

The Navy uses highly enriched uranium for its reactors, something like 70-80% enrichment. This is a non starter for civilian use, on account of proliferation concerns. That, and the enrichment requirements drive up fuel costs.

Naval reactors use HEU specifically so that humans can live and work in close proximity for long periods of time.

Land-based deployments don't have this constraint.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#259

Post by tfourb » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #175

jltsiren wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political will is not the actual bottleneck. Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company chosen to build it first proved to be incompetent and later also politically undesirable. As for the third reactor, the company that got the permit determined that it makes more sens…

China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.

China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#260

Post by palata » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

esarbe wrote: post #221

UltraSane wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.

No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative. We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive. It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition". [0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...

> the systems were just too expensive.

Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.

I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".