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Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

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Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#381

Post by hereme888 »

Kon5ole wrote: post #344
hereme888 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The estimated levelized cost of electricity changes dramatically with financing cost: from roughly the low-$100s/MWh under cheap capital to well above $200/MWh under high capital-cost assumptions. But wasn't that the case for wind and solar too?

For solar I believe it's profitable without subsidies in most parts of the world by now. It's the fastest growing power source by far worldwide and it wouldn't be if it had to be financed by subsidies. I don't know enough about wind to say either way about that. But both wind and solar have the benefit of being able to just abandon the plants if they turn out to lose money. Which you of course cannot do with a nuclea…

Well, wind and solar were absolutely subsidy-driven. The difference is that after subsidies, they became cheap and modular, and I hope nuclear becoming modular and cheaper as well.

Rancho Seco.... what an insane story. Didn't know about that. So if your have a bad nuclear project, people are basically stuck with it, unlike replacing solar panels or wind turbines.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#382

Post by m101 »

chinathrow wrote: post #339
m101 wrote: post #319

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing: - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power - nuclear waste is not a problem - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more po…

Can you elaborate why waste is not a problem?

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/600-year-old-spent-nucle...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#383

Post by legitster »

gpm wrote: post #341
m101 wrote: post #319

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing: - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power - nuclear waste is not a problem - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more po…

> - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials. Solar panels, wind, and batteries have all dropped in price so much that solar backed by batteries to create stable powers (and/or wind doing the same, or a mix), is in the vast majority of the world…

> Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials.

The actual operating costs are extremely low. Most of the cited $/kwh figures include the capital costs of the extreme 10+ year approval process. There's also no economies of scale right now.

If you add up all of the deaths directly from radiation exposure in the nuclear power industry it's literally 31 - and 28 came from Chernobyl. It's a fraction of rounding error compared to every other energy type.

Nearly all of the dangers of radiation were cooked up by the oil and gas industry based on a series of now discredited fruit fly studies in the 1950s.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#384

Post by m101 »

LinXitoW wrote: post #325
m101 wrote: post #319

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing: - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power - nuclear waste is not a problem - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more po…

What choices make nuclear expensive that we could actually get rid of WITHOUT IMMEDIATELY increasing risk (which is low because of regulation)? Moreover, it's crazy that so much regulation was provably written in blood paid by workers and public after a company got greedy. Sure, let's build 50 AND reduce regulations. Finally, the biggest fucking thing: It is MORE expensive NOW than the green alternatives, AND green e…

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/how-can-nrc-style-regula...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#385

Post by awesome_dude »

jokteur wrote: post #32

This still has to pass with the people in a referendum. The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic. Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full fro…

1. Ukraine nuclear power plants are a massive liability - they make for easy targets for the Russians to obliterate the country - is that what you want for Switzerland?

2. The waste - nobody wants it - it's a hazard for tens of thousands of years - what's the plan for managing it?

Yes energy generation (and independence) is important, no nuclear ain't it.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#386

Post by moffkalast »

lenerdenator wrote: post #244
jltsiren wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies. China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.

> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days. Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.

Well see the problem is we'd get the reactor hardware and we'd have to write the control software ourselves ha ha.

In practice though Westinghouse still bids lowest out of the politically viable options these days. Korean and French reactors are rather expensive.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#387

Post by dev_l1x_be »

bilekas wrote: post #146
jokteur wrote: post #32

This still has to pass with the people in a referendum. The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic. Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full fro…

Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.

Any country that does not use nuclear using less energy dense alternatives. Compressing controllable energy production should be considered one of our top priorities.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#388

Post by awesome_dude »

chpatrick wrote: post #378
TheCondor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…

I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.

This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years

And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#389

Post by m101 »

pfdietz wrote: post #367
m101 wrote: post #319

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing: - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power - nuclear waste is not a problem - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more po…

Yes, we know nuclear is actually super great, because of all the merchant nuclear plants that have been built around the world. Here is a complete list of those plants:

Nuclear used to be built cheaply, before regulatory uncertainty made private construction effectively impossible:

https://gordianknotbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/essay...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#390

Post by rayiner »

tfourb wrote: post #308
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…

> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. The only reason why "environmentalists" were able to influence the debate around nuclear is because nuclear is uneconomical and studded with actual, real problems. Look at fossil fuels. Environmentally and in terms of public health it is way worse than nuclear (at least a current respective buildout levels). And environmentalists hav…

> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar.

France went 75% nuclear in the 1980s. If we had built all those nuclear plants back in the 1980s when France did, they would be fully depreciated by now. And we'd be having this conversation about "cheap solar" in a far more favorable position where we had avoided huge amounts of CO2 emissions for 40+ years while we waited for solar technology to improve.

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