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

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#421

Post by throwthrowuknow » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #327

subscribed wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar. Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past. Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.

Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.

Ask why it suddenly got so expensive and why delays were introduced. Hint, it happened more in some countries than others.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#422

Post by palata » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:17 PM UTC

Krasnol wrote: post #395

indoordin0saur wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container. The storage units for this stuff is incredibly…

Waste which will be here for many generations of humans and can seriously harm them is overblown? It never cases to amaze me how much blatant misinformation circulates around this topic. Just a few years ago, nobody sane would have predicted Trump. How can anybody seriously predict what would happen to this waste in a few years? I'm not even talking about generations here.

Again, destroy a dam and you get a catastrophe. Don't do anything in particular and watch how many people die in the mid-term due to climate change.

It's all about risk management.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#423

Post by palata » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

awesome_dude wrote: post #388

chpatrick wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An earthquake will not suddenly take the waste from hundreds of meters underground and throw it in the air. I mean, assuming you store it in a reasonable place.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#424

Post by palata » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

esarbe wrote: post #152

bilekas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1]. At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...

> It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years.

Renewables are not remotely displacing fossil fuels. Look at fossil fuel consumption.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#425

Post by pocksuppet » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

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.

Do you trust that any of today's politicians will not be poor at nuclear reactor design and management?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#426

Post by kieranmaine » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:22 PM UTC

m101 wrote: post #374

Matumio wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that's fair. Sometimes the sun actually does shine, and while you won't get rich selling energy during that time, having electricity available essentially for free during some of the peak hours is worth something. Someone will eventually find a use for free energy. If nothing else, at least we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.

When the sun shines sure you can power down other power stations, but you still need to maintain them and have them around for when the sun doesn't shine. So when you have lots of intermittent energy it means that you actually cannot shelve your old technology - you still have to maintain it, but now you're paying for the maintenance over less capacity used. This is only one of the reasons why prices are going up in…

For UK specific electricity costs I'd recommend looking at https://www.electricitybills.uk/

The UK is a grid that is adding lots of renewables and building some nuclear plants, so the site provides good data around the costs for the added transmission, storage and subsidies (for both renewables and nuclear) needed for a renewables heavy grid supplemented with nuclear.

* Forecast cost for 2030: https://www.electricitybills.uk/2030

* Source data is here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SHuFAtxxKUf3Q2b7usoT...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#427

Post by gpvos » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #240

BurningFrog wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP was making a geometric observation.

By that light, the UK is still in the EU. I bet they would disagree though.

The UK is not enclosed by the EU.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#428

Post by Manuel_D » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:24 PM UTC

15155 wrote: post #258

Manuel_D wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does the enrichment of uranium have to do with humans working in proximity? In both low-enriched land based plants and in marine nuclear power plants, the radioactive materials are contained in the pressure vessel and inner cooling loop.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#429

Post by jrflowers » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #370

SXX wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest problem is that people not aware of how many closed down or not built nuclear power plants been replaced with coal power plants. And coal kills more people in a week than all nuclear incidents killed in all history of humanity. Not even mention that coal power plants release more radioactive materials too.

Which nuclear plants were replaced with coal plants? If you say "German plants", I'll point out coal consumption for power generation in Germany has gone down since the decision to phase out nuclear. Coal consumption would likely have gone down even more with nuclear still being used, but that doesn't support your claim as stated.

That’s a strange way of wording “Germany burns more coal today than they would be if they hadn’t replaced their nuclear power plants with coal power plants”. Jumbling up the word order doesn’t make Germany replacing their nuclear plants with coal plants a good thing.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#430

Post by throwthrowuknow » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #237

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 How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?

It’s easy to make the general public fearful of nuclear because they have no direct experience with it in daily life.