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

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#481

Post by Arodex » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

ttoinou wrote: post #162

Arodex wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then nuclear isn't it. Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland. The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymo…

You can make decades stocks of the fissile source

What is the cost of storing fissile radioactive material?

This is making less and less economic sense. All paid by public money.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#482

Post by coryrc » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

Danox wrote: post #461

tfourb wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month. fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly. Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway,…

Germany shouldn’t have dismantled those nuclear power plants dumb…

Just a couple years before the first invasion of Ukraine. Wouldn't it have been nice in 2022 when the Nordstream pipelines stopped?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#483

Post by leonidasrup » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

TheCondor wrote: post #245

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.

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…

Waste management has been solved problem.

"A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced."

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

"The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico, US, is a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years."

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

But for political reasons it's used only for military nuclear high level waste.

For Europe I don't see a reason why each country needs a nuclear waste repository. High level nuclear waste is very small and French nuclear waste from light water reactors is no different from Swiss nuclear waste or Swedish, German, Spanish. (U.K. Magnox fuel rods are different and have special storage requirements). Single waste repository in Finland, Sweden or Norway would be enough, they have lot of old granite and very stable geology.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#484

Post by well_ackshually » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:15 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #156

well_ackshually wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'll be so happy about being price competitive when the conditions are bad for like a week and the country just doesn't run (or rely on other countries price gouging you for what your country needs to exist.) Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible h…

> You need both Why do you need both? It's possible to get 99.99% reliability with wind & solar & batteries & weather modelling. There are multiple ways to handle a week long dankelflaute without nuclear: overbuilding, continental scale distribution, lots of batteries, etc. All are cheaper than nuclear. It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid, even a nuclear dominated one. L…

"Why do you need both, it's possible with technologies we don't have at scales we don't control with predictions weeks ahead on a rapidly changing and unpredictable weather model"

Yeah, uh, I'm going to go with the "building a nuclear plant is the safest solution" answer, thanks. Technosolutionism is fun up to a certain point.

>It's possible to get 99.99% reliability [...] It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid

Notwithstanding the fact that lol you're happily saying that you're perfectly fine you get 1 hour of complete downtime every year, which fucks over many industries and services, you're ignoring multiple facts: 1/ to ensure safety, that means rolling brownouts when you're at 95% capacity, great solution, 2/ 99.99% works exactly like it does in software: you don't get tiny seconds long drops, you get gigantic, energy grid collapsing catastrophic failures, that are impossible to restart, grid sync because every renewable island is isolated.

>It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability

What kind of incompetent country are you living in? I have had exactly ZERO minutes of power outages for the past 5 years. I'll be generous and include the 30 minutes of downtime for maintenance. The country wide average blackout time is 2m30s, .43 power cuts / person / year. That's 99.996% stability country wide, and that's heavily weighted down by the places that get fucked by a tree collapsing on a transformer station

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#485

Post by Arodex » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

p2detar wrote: post #243

Arodex wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night. Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have? For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop?

> For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop This is a horrible argument. Yeah, let’s not spend money improving technology. We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.

>We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.

We didn't for decades. The photoelectric effect is known since the XIXth century. Solar panel research could have had far more money behind it since the 70s and the first oil crisis. It was a choice not to. And the current US and Swiss governments are choosing to prop up some industries -coal, nuclear- at the expense of others, with public money that don't grow on trees.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#486

Post by WalterBright » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:20 PM UTC

legitster wrote: post #391

WalterBright wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the Fukushima disaster, radioactivity was detected in the seawater off the west cost of America. This, of course, threw people into a panic, despite being detectable only with very sensitive equipment and was not a danger to anyone or anything.

To be more specific, you would not have been able to detect Fukushima waste based on radioactivity, as the radioactivity would not have been detectable above the normal background radiation. They could only identify the waste by it's distinct radiological profile. Otherwise it was just another source amongst millions of ionizing radiation that bathes us every day.

> They could only identify the waste by it's distinct radiological profile.

Which is what happened.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#487

Post by fc417fc802 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:23 PM UTC

TheCondor wrote: post #447

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.

Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too. For the record, this thorium react…

> the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened?

Because the topic is politically contentious. It doesn't matter which new site is floated or who proposes it when there's effectively blind opposition without regard to technical merit.

The reality is that for any objectively defined risk metric we can come up with a solution that involves burying it in the ground at some depth and in a certain sort of surrounding geology. At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#488

Post by Danox » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:24 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #397

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.

I don’t think it can. Nuclear is cheap at scale, not when you build a single prototype every 20 years. You need large countries with large programmes to be successful.

It doesn’t take 20 years to build. Are we in the west gonna wait for the Chinese to build out Thorium Reactors, are we also gonna wait for high-speed rail to be built out by the Chinese too if it wasn’t for the war with Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese probably would have built out high-speed rail, all all the way to Europe, by the way, they’ve already built a rail system all the way to Tehran.

And the Chinese have built out a high speed rail system all the way to Ürümqi, China just east of Kazakhstan in western China. (They aren’t messing around).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/9e4...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#489

Post by Arodex » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #466

Arodex wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a silly argument, this is a problem of allocation of resources. We could have had mass solar deployment since the 70s. We chose not to, and allocate the money elsewhere. Nuclear will take away billions in public money, put it into the hands of nuclear industries, to get electricity at twice the going rate, maybe, in twenty years. A white elephant and a waste of effort.

Can you explain how that would have worked with the much less efficient and much more expensive solar panels available in the 70s?

All the R&D and industrial capacity building we have done since the 70s could have been accelerated if we had invested in it as much as we invested in nuclear, or oil, or gas, or coal. With public money.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-hidden-ways-the-g...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#490

Post by fc417fc802 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

TimorousBestie wrote: post #478

onraglanroad wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was paid for by the taxpayer. Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?

Winning arguments on the internet is more important than ideological consistency.

Or alternatively a reasonable person will accept the observation that sufficiently large problems with sufficiently bad consequences need to be socialized. However even then there is still going to be disagreement about where exactly to draw the line. That nuclear and climate change falls far to one side of it should not be a surprise.