EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy • Hacker News Board

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#891

Post by zekrioca » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #677

kpmcc wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is climate friendly about natural gas?

It's cleaner than coal and oil. If you upgrade a coal plant to a gas plant, that's a step forward against climate change. Yes, we'd be much better off with wind farms, solar plants, and nuclear reactors, but a step forward is a step forward. Countries like Poland, running mostly on coal, would get cleaner air and contribute less to global warming if they were to upgrade their power plants to anything non-coal. Replac…

Clever use of the adjective “cleaner”. Try replacing it with “less dirty, but still pollutant and toxic” to see an alternative, correct version of what you have written.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#892

Post by pembrook » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

jenadine wrote: post #763

teamonkey wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s. Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... https://en.wik…

Don't judge plane safety from the design of the brothers Wright aircraft

It's absolutely insane how safe we've managed to make plane travel considering all the variables involved.

Statistically, taking a flight from NYC to London is safer than walking from 5th avenue to 4th avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#893

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #884

nilslindemann wrote: post #853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my brown bear vs car comparison above/below. Also, solar causes less deaths, according to your counting method. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Analogy doesn’t work, it’s deaths per TWhour that matter.

[deleted]

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#894

Post by porridgeraisin » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

kevincox wrote: post #872

gilbetron wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths. Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.

Most importantly if you scale fatalities by power generated Nuclear is one of the best (last I checked only bested by solar). Coal generates releases way more radiation into the environment and has way more deaths during mining. People are irrationally scared by large incidents and under-represent the regular deaths and costs that occur during operation.

What sort of nonsense statistic is fatalities per watt hour?

People agree with fatalities per hour of travel because it makes sense. If you're a really frequent flyer, you are more likely to die. In nuclear, I don't give a crap how many watt hour the plant 1000km away from me is generating, I don't want it to affect me. I am however OK with the plant next door affecting me, because I have a say in that. I can choose to live elsewhere.

Someone mentioned rooftop solar causing more deaths. If my rooftop solar falls on my head, only I die.

You can't just reduce everything to aggregate statistics. The relationship and proximity of the affected to the thing that causes the accident also matters.

> Coal

Yes, but the miners die, and only his family face the consequences. Some unrelated guy 50km away doesn't. BIG difference.

Now, modern nuclear plants have way better containment, and e.g I advocate heavily for SMRs [1]. But the fear of nuclear pre-SMR is completely justified and correct as I argued above.

[1] I suppose practically, the ones with 10km radius are also OK. Gen III I think? That is a reasonable region to tell people "if you live here, you might have to evacuate and you might be screwed". Any system with a zone beyond that should always be opposed.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#895

Post by cauch » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

m101 wrote: post #561

I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.

Probably said somewhere else, but "green" originally means "does not create toxic waste when used". Nuclear is nice and good for the environment, but it does fit in the definition "produce waste", even if this waste can be considered as small or can be somehow treated.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#896

Post by Saline9515 » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:22 PM UTC

mikepavone wrote: post #821

Saline9515 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price. Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%, which makes it quite flexible in real condition. See https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ... as a proof - nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day. New small modular r…

> This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price. This may be an accurate description for fully-depreciated nuclear plants, but it doesn't reflect the economics of new-build nuclear at all. You have to consider both operating and capital costs. Nuclear plants are cheap to operate once built, but those operation…

> This may be an accurate description for fully-depreciated nuclear plants, but it doesn't reflect the economics of new-build nuclear at all.

I'm talking about the wholesale market, which works as an auction, where producers give their price for units of capacity, and the clearing price is set by the marginal producer. Typically, nuclear reactors will give their marginal cost, near 0, and let the more expensive producers set the clearing price. Given that capital cost is a sunk cost, it doesn't matter to nuclear plants as long as the market price is above the marginal one. So called "renewables" do this as well, but have to account for the risk that mother nature doesn't provide, and therefore factor in the risk of having to buy coal or gas-produced electricity on the spot.

> Net demand on CAISO can go from about 2 MW to 30 MW in the summer.

Well if this is the case this is not a "nuclear sized" market then and other ways of supplying capacity are better. But remember that it's estimated that blackouts are much,much more costly society-wise than whatever marginal price you could pay for electricity, so having a baseload and some excess capacity is always good. This is also why many electricity producers are nationalized. It's not a market like the others.

> Flamanville

France has the strictest regulator of the world, which adds a lot of costs, and Flamanville required to re-learn many things after losing the expertise from the 70's. For the record, an airliner should be able to fall on Flamanville without any problem, due to regulations.

> Curtailements

Excess electricity is sold in Germany, which lacks a much-needed baseload, especially since they have a big industry. Most people ignore that electricity consumption follows Pareto's law, with around 1k industrial plants consuming around 50% of the electricity (sorry no source for this, my econ teacher said in a class a few years ago!).

> SMR

Yes, still in development, many different designs so costs estimates are difficult to make. I'm citing Wikipedia's[0]. The good thing is that the possibility to build them serially should decrease a lot the costs as demand ramps up.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_SMR

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#897

Post by prinny_ » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

southernplaces7 wrote: post #839

prinny_ wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am against nuclear energy because my government is deeply corrupted and give contracts to their friends. They also appoint unqualified people to the highest positions to award them big salaries and the results are catastrophic tragedies with tens of casualties each time. I don’t trust them to operate the railroads, why would I trust them to operate a nuclear facility?

So you would oppose an entire, globe-spanning branch of deeply necessary technology (clean energy) with all its vast opportunities for improvement, innovation, and management under all kinds of more responsible means, because the government functionaries in your specific part of the world can't get their moral shit together (and given what you describe, wouldn't be able to do it well no matter what kid of large-scale…

No. I only vote in my country. Other countries can do as they see fit.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#898

Post by hvb2 » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #357

hvb2 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little. Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with…

> The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. We already do that. France notably has a lot of hydropower and they pump water up when they don’t want to shutdown a nuclear unit. The issue is that there is very little places where you could build new dams in Europe and water shortage is becoming a regular occurrence.

Not every dam has to be of the size of the Hoover dam. A single huge battery is also not practical.

Yes water shortage might be a problem if the river you're on runs dry. That's not often a problem though, plenty of major rivers. And a dam doesn't change the total amount that flows, it just changes when. As a result it might even help in lowering some flood risks.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#899

Post by johnisgood » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:40 PM UTC

rpdillon wrote: post #824

scandox wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm open to Nuclear if it can be done safely and if we can show we have the cultural maturity to keep it safe...but in the case of Chernobyl at least I think that statistics and other officious BS has been used to greatly downplay the true human cost in death, sickness, displacement and on many other metrics.

Two points: Chernobyl was a poor, badly run reactor that was designed badly decades ago. I don't know why we paint all of nuclear with that brush, other than folks fall victim to availability bias all the time. The other point is that we sweep aside externalities for all forms of power generation. People don't think of coal as dangerous, but it's killed far more than nuclear.

We do not even have to go as far as killed; injured will suffice[1]. The differences are extremely huge between fossil fuel vs nuclear.

[1] ... and it is on-going. It is happening right now.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#900

Post by Saline9515 » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 6:40 PM UTC

dalyons wrote: post #777

Saline9515 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price. Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%, which makes it quite flexible in real condition. See https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ... as a proof - nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day. New small modular r…

The massive capital costs of the plant have to be paid back in the sale price of energy, that’s what makes it expensive. France’s state built plants don’t have that accounting

But the market price asked by nuclear plant doesn't account for capital costs as the real price will always be higher. What is important is the clearing price not the asking price.