Summary
France’s Flamanville 3 nuclear reactor, its most powerful at 1,600 MW, was connected to the grid on December 21 after 17 years of construction plagued by delays and budget overruns.
The European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), designed to boost nuclear energy post-Chernobyl, is 12 years behind schedule and cost €13.2 billion, quadruple initial estimates.
President Macron hailed the launch as a key step for low-carbon energy and energy security.
Nuclear power, which supplies 60% of France’s electricity, is central to Macron’s plan for a “nuclear renaissance.”
For additional context, one of the reason for the delay and cost increase was the absurdly complex design due to French and German companies trying to collaborate on a new design as Germany was turning anti-nuclear, which culminated with Germany deciding to stop nuclear energy after the Fukushima Daiichi event.
Another big reason is the knowledge loss due to almost one generation without any reactor built in between.
Now do Georgia’s Vogtle reactors 3 and 4, which came in at 34 billion for 2 x 1200mw plants, 21 billion over the original 14 billion estimate, and took over 14 years to build, 8 years behind schedule.
Im glad these powerplants finally got built. They will help, but nuclear is just not reasonable anymore. Its a slow, expensive tech, especially when we are making such leaps and bonds with solar/battery.
Even if wind and solar make huge progress, they will likely never be as efficient regarding raw materials efficiency and land use. Land use is the main contributor to biodiversity loss.
I don’t think peremptory opinions about technologies are going to help. We should use what ever technology is the most reasonable and sustainable for each specific location.
There is no particular reason solar “needs” to use any new land at all, given that we can just put it on the roofs we already have.
And the fact that we do dedicate land to it instead of only doing rooftop just goes to show that land use isn’t anywhere near as important a problem as you insinuate.
Your comment is pure FUD.
You are very quick to deduct things. The reason land is dedicated to it is that it is not easy to organize with building owners to get it on the roof, compared to buying land building what you want on it, and equipping roofs is obviously more technical than building on the ground. We can’t just think it terms on what could be possible but what the reality is.
Countries who try to stop land artificialization to reduce impact on biodiversity struggle to, because of all the economical pressure where renewables may contribute, it’s not an easy subject.
Please try not to look for negative intentions, I am here to participate in the debate and learn with others.
Total land used for all power to be supplied by solar would be a hilariously tiny percentage of land, so this just reads like a solar version of “its killing birds” to me.
Agrivoltaics also side steps this non issue, as interlacing solar panels into farm land increases yields for many crops while making efficent use of space that’s already spoiled any biodiversity. Can you do that with a nuclear reactor?
Nuclear could take over existing coal plants which would allow use of otherwise unusable land that’s been polluted by coal. It would require regulatory changes though, as the coal plant is already irradiated beyond allowed levels for nuclear.
Yeah in a perfect world based on some rough data you could supply the entire planet’s energy requirements with a solar plant about 300,000 square kilometers, or basically the size of Arizona, which translates to about 0.2% of the total landmass on earth. That being said, I’m curious what a solar plant the cost of this nuclear plant would look like, and where they’d put it. I think centralized vs distributed land rights and compensation is really tougher than the tech at this point.
wtf? Decentralized production is one of solar’s greatest advantages.
Nevada just built a hybrid 1400MW solar/battery plant for 2 billion dollars in 2 years.
That 1400MW is solar panel + battery output, so it doesnt match nuclear’s steady state, but ive done the math on these projects before. We should be able to can build a 3000MW solar generating plant with 1200MW battery supply for 16hrs at roughly a cost of 17 Billion dollars, or 1 Vogtle nuclear plant. My time estimate was 6 years. This would output 2x the power of the Vogtle plant during the day, and output just as much as it over the night.
The above makes solar/battery not only way more productive than nuclear, but way safer, and way faster to built. All of that is just with demonstrated, everyday tech available today. It ignores all the huge advances being made in various batteries and panels. In the decade+ that it would take to open just one more reactor, we will likely be able to 2x-3x the power and speed to build at a lower cost with just solar/battery.
Nuclear was the right answer for the last 50 years. That’s no longer the case.
Something to note about this chart is that ground-mount silicon solar PV isn’t considered for sharing land use with activities such as farming in comparison to how onshore wind is (i.e. agrivoltaics).
NREL in the US estimates that there are currently ~10.1 GW of agrivoltaics projects spread across ~62,400 acres (or ~7 m^2 / MW).
Even this being said, I think brownfield or existing structures for new PV is the way of the future for solar PV. There is so much real estate that could be used and has the potential to offset grid demand growth while providing greater reliability for consumers. You’ll need the big players to help with industrial loads, but even then, the growth of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) has the potential to balance loads at the same scale as the big players for the prosumer market.
Edit: I’ll also make mention of floatovoltaics, or the installation of solar PV on bodies of water, either natural or artificial. This is a burgeoning side of the industry, but this is another area that could present net zero or even negative land use per unit of energy.
Don’t forget solar fences
Something to note about your link to solar fences is that one of the cons mentioned is that panels can’t produce power for half of the day because they’ll be facing away from the sun.
Bifacial panels exist and can collect energy from both faces of the module. We in the utility-scale space use these all the time. You’d want these over monofacial panels for fence applications
Yes. Bifacial seems like the obvious choice. And the fence should be NS orientation not EW.
If you’re trying to maximize energy collection then yes you’ll want to face the fence rows NS.
But there are also some benefits for making use of vertical bifacial panels oriented EW. You get a bimodal energy plot: one in the morning and one in the evening when the sun’s direct rays shine near horizontal (something NS panels can’t collect).
I’d actually be interested in reading the literature on mixing these types of panel orientations to see what the resulting production yields would look like, and if stakeholders like utilities would find any benefit in them to help better manage grid demand in those peripheral times of the day.
Solar fencing produces 3% more yield and 30% more revenue than rooftop.
This is a poor argument. You just did what you explicitly should not do with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results.
The ISO 14044 specifically requires life cycle assessment to include all relevant impact categories. In particular in comparative analysis it is crucial to not single out any one category, but look at the impact on the endpoints, e.g. ecosystems or human health.
https://www.h2.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Einrichtungen/Hochschulbibliothek/Downloaddateien/DIN_EN_ISO_14044.pdf
See page 37 onwards.
Here is the full LCA study, that you drew only one category from
https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL March 2022.pdf
Look at the Endpoint indicators, like “Lifecycle impact on ecosystems, per MWh, in pointes”, “Life cycle impacts on ecosystems, no climate change,per MWh, in pointes”, “Life cycle impacts on human health,per MWh, in pointes” etc.
Nuclear power does fare well in these categories, but often only marginally different to Wind Power and Solar Power. It certainly does not offset the cost difference, when you also have to include the opportunity costs of running coal or gas plants longer.
This is a poor argument. You just did what you explicitly should not do when engaging in a discussion: building a straw man argument and cherry picking a part of an answer.
I highlighted two rarely mentioned and non-intuitive points about nuclear vs renewables, I bet a few readers learned about it. But, I didn’t say renewables shouldn’t be used. My conclusion says the opposite, don’t have blocked opinions about technologies, use whatever is most adapted to the location, if it’s renewable, that’s great.
Could you compare it to land used for livestock or car parks or low density housing?
If we went 100% solar is that even noticeable compared to mentioned above.
You just making excuses.
I am not making any excuse, I’m providing additional points to consider.
Pointless points. It’s a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. You’re just a fossil fuel shill.
Why do you have to reduce a discussion to chilling? What a sad attitude.
I guess you’re not in a listening mood, but in case you are, let me state my opinion: I am in favor of all solutions that will help reduce the ecological crisis, which means reducing dependency of fossil fuels, raw materials extraction, and land usage among other things. I think both nuclear and renewables are good solutions for that, but they both have issues, so let’s use what is most appropriate for every use case.
Could you not compare unrelated stuff? What you just did is called “whataboutism”.
“Land use is the main contributor to biodiversity loss”
Is that not a quote from what is being talked about.
How much of land use that is contributing to biodiversity loss is solar panels and wind? How much is energy in total?
It’s fuck all. So yea that is relevant.
It’s slow expensive tech because we don’t invest in it.
Every technology is slow and expensive when you have nearly an entire generational gap in knowledge and experience.
You’ll know that I’m not saying solar and wind are not cheaper, they all exist in a different capacity and fill in the gaps they best fit.
We have invested decades and billions into reactor tech. The DOE just announced another 900 million for SMR, on top of previous billion dollar grants. So far, every SMR company has failed to make any progress. The DOE even certified one for use and it still can’t get it done.
Meanwhile, solar/battery research is getting funding from tons of sources, government and corporate, and exploding forward in every direction. Solar arrays are being deployed all over the world at insane rates, propelled mostly by just how inexpensive, safe, effective and easy it is to deploy. Its because of solar/battery that we may even hit some of the 2030 “pie in the sky” climates goals that were set across the world.
Its pretty clear which of the two techs we should be spending time on.
Both. There aren’t enough rare earth materials to build enough solar panels to completely erase power plants. Panels have a devastating mining issue similar to batteries as well. Solar has lots of hidden costs no one talks about. It’s cheap just like batteries but the opportunity cost is huge. Nuclear meanwhile has a high upfront cost which is the real reason it scares away investors. Also political anti nuclear nutters don’t help with financing issues.
Solar panels can be made of many different types and volumes of material. First solar, the largest manufacturer in the US, uses a differenr process than chinese panels for example. Perovskite solar cells, which are not just yet ready for prime time but are advancing rapidly, don’t use any.
Nuclear power has its own mining and rare material problems, in the form of uranium. You have to dig into the earth for it, and then after you use it, poison part of the planet forever. We still dont know what to do with all the nuclear waste we alrwady made.
Not exactly an ecological win.
Thorium is 3-4 times more abundant than uranium, is generally safer to use and would produce less waste that is also less radioactive and can become safe in a reasonable timeframe (few centuries compared to few hundred/thousand? centuries). Historically the main issue with Thorium has been that it’s not as sexy as uranium because you can’t make nuclear weapons out of thorium.
Perovskite uses rare earth metals too, so while they increase efficiency they are just as destructive
You can fit all the nuclear waste jn the world in one football field. It’s not alot.
Perovskite are iterating through many different materials as the science settles on them, but one of the positives is that the materials aren’t nearly as rare.
This is not true because of radioactive waste water, containment vessels and spent fuel rods, all of which are highly radioactive along with your football field of actual spent fuel, but okay.
If we could do this or something like it, why haven’t we? Is it because no one on earth wants that football field? Is it because we tried this at sites like Hanford, Washington and its been a half century of ecological disaster?
People undersell just how destructive the entire radioactive waste cycle is. Nuclear is way, way better than coal and oil, but solar/batteries kick its teeth in here.
Again, your hostility to Nuclear is completely misguided. Even the UN admits that Nuclear is needed to solve climate change https://news.un.org/en/interview/2024/06/1151006
China is building dozens of new Nuclear reactors while being the capital of solar panel manufacturing. There is no teeth kicking necessary. Nuclear kicks teeth out of everything in terms of reliability. Solar kicks teeth on speed and cost. Don’t be a propaganda machine
Reminds me of this comic. Seeing it first hand with people like you
https://i.redd.it/9o6czv4wa58c1.jpeg
Nuclear reactors have always been subsidized by the military. Solar and wind are so much cheaper than anything that came before.
Solar is not sustainable. Maybe one day but today’s panels will all have to be replaced in a few decades. For now it’s a way to bridge the needed to go fully nuclear.
By replaced, do you mean recycled
No. I mean, hopefully both, but solar panels can’t be fully recycled into new solar panels. A bunch of rare materials need to be mined over and over.
You realize nuclear power plants have steady maintenance and replacements occurring at all times, right? That a machine being used in nuclear power doesn’t make it immune from breaking down? That many of the machines involved have spinning and moving parts working in a high heat environment, whereas PV systems are largely static?
Replacement in a nuclear plant is happening way, way more often than on PV panels, where commodity panels are rated to provide near full power for 25-35 years, and then still provide over 80% power while they very slowly drop off. Solar is the only power source that will continue providing power without constant maintenance.
If “lack of replacement” is your main criteria, you dun fucked up backing nuclear. Solar fits that bill way, way better.
Of course a nuclear reactor needs maintenance and thus also produces infrastructure waste. A lot more than a solar cell. But it dwarfs when you divide by watt-hours. Solar cells produce dozens of times more waste per watt-hour, and stuff that’s worse to handle too. Nuclear plants are mostly concrete and steel. Solar panels are glass and rare elements that we can’t recycle properly yet.
Like, you didn’t really think I was just comparing plants to cells did you? The point is, if the whole world goes solar, how many times over can we replace all of it?
NREL’s Solar PV fact sheet on circularity says that conventional solar PV panels have recovery rates of 80-95% given existing recycling infrastructure.
We know how to recycle these things. The fact that we maybe don’t do so in a widespread way is because it’s still cheaper to throw shit in a landfill or incinerator.
95% doesn’t mean you can turn 100 old panels into 95 new panels. The 5% is cobalt and stuff, that needs to be mined over and over. It’s great that we have such rates but we’re not really lacking in glass.
???
You realize the above is true for basically any building, right? That that’s a crazy metric to judge any maintenance effort by? Total weight of the building and then everything in it?
Do datacenters not have replaceable parts because they are mainly concrete and steel? Sure, they may have 10,000 servers that all need to be fixed and replaced constantly but since a datacenter is mostly concrete and steel, it doesn’t matter because it’s not much by total mass of the datacenter? Same goes for airports, factories, on and on.
I guess if you plonk thousands of maintenance heavy devices into a large enough building then weigh the whole structure, the percentage of the structure that has to be serviced goes down, making overall (by weight) maintenance go down. Airplanes need to be fixed? They weigh basically nothing compared to airports, so “tada!” no they dont!
Skipping over your bizarre metric, solar cell recycling is hitting 95%. That is again, something that isn’t relevant with modern panels for 30-50+ years, as they will still be producing 70-80% of their rated power at that time. That’s easily enough power to just leave them in use.
Lol and the commenter above you is forgetting about the aluminum of the PV module’s frame, as well as stainless steel used for the racking. Those things are super easy to recycle.
Ehh, concrete is very polluting, and nuclear plants need a lot of it. It’s not gonna get recycled either. I thought this was obvious. Dunno how you thought that was a dunk.
But we can keep building them. It’ll always be expensive, but we don’t need much rare material.
I was hoping I’d see cobalt etc in your link, but still not then… For solar cells we need that 5% to be mined over and over. 50 years is nothing if you’re talking about renewables. Might as well not care about sustainability at all if you’re not talking another 5000 years.
Cobalt is more abundant in the earths crust than thorium or uranium by an order of magnitude.
And we need several orders of magnitude more of it per Wh. We’ll run out of sand to make cement to build reactors before we run out of uranium.
Just because those panels will need to be replaced in decades time doesn’t mean they won’t have value then.
NREL estimates that PV 80-95% of modules’ materials can be recovered through recycling, and there is constant academic work on refining the EoL process to better delaminate panels so they can be better sorted and their materials better reused.
I can’t find the figure, but I believe the IPCC found in their 6th Assessment Report that the cost to deploy renewables + battery storage, and manage the grid more intelligently on the backend, absolutely demonstrate lower costs than it takes to build new nuclear. I want to say that that finding still out value on our existing nuclear fleet, so we definitely don’t want to shut any existing plants down if we don’t have to.
I don’t think fission nuclear will get our energy systems off of fossil fuels. Fusion nuclear has the potential to do this, but by the time that technology reaches commercial operation, renewables alone will likely be in the multiples of TW of generation capacity.
Nuclear should be part of the future if modularity and MSRs/thorium reactors can breakthrough. Until then, solar/wind + storage baby
I hope, nuclear means nuclear fusion here…
Hey, you don’t know where the next tsunami will happen. Have to be proactive.
The real irony being that all Japanese reactors shut down due to the quake as designed, and the tsunami wouldn’t have been a factor had money not been saved by shortcutting backup generator protection from flooding in a FLOOD ZONE.
Bro, THE FUCKING BACKUP DIESEL GENERATORS FOR THE PLANT WERE BELOW SEA LEVEL.
Make it make sense. If those generators had been above sea level, well probably above 100-year tsunami levels, we likely would not have seen the plant catastrophically fail.
That was part of the problem. Built where it was cheaper, ignoring literal ancient markers saying not to live there because of the past. But they would have still not failed, had they been designed for the potential of being submerged. Again, they were not because that would cost more for a long range risk. It all falls into bad planning and profit, not in any way because it was a nuclear plant.
bad planning and profit are of course words never uttered in connection with German infrastructure projects.
This just serves as a lesson to the “failsafe technology” crowd: That also involves failsafe humans. Those, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to be invented.
Oh and relatedly some German reactor ran for decades without a backup power generator. It was there, present, physically, that is, but noone bothered to check whether it actually worked. Merkel justified her flip-flop on the nuclear exit (shortly before Fukushima, she delayed the exit that SPD+Greens had decided on) by saying, more or less, “If the Japanese can’t do it we can’t do it either” but if she had been paying attention, it should’ve been clear that we couldn’t do it. That became clear when the first SPD+Green coalition moved responisibity for nuclear safety from the ministry for economy to that for the environment, run by a Green, and they made a breakfast out of all that shoddy work that the operators had done. Oh the containment vessel is riveted… figures they put the rivets in the wrong way. Shut it down, have fun re-doing every single one of them before starting it up again.
Thus, my conclusion: The only people you can trust to run nuclear reactors safely are people who don’t want nuclear reactors to exist in the first place.
Human failsafes have been invented. Every nuclear silo has one: two, independent people, with unique keys, have to both agree to launch. Otherwise, it fails safe, and no launch. Even with valid launch orders.
Are you trying to tell us it’s impossible for these two humans to fail at the same time? There’s some physical law preventing them from receiving false information and acting on it? They can’t be manipulated or forced to do things they don’t want to?
That’s the kind of failsafe GP was talking about. Not “99% safe except for rare circumstances”, but actually 100% safe.
Well, it hasn’t failed yet…
The tower of playing cards I built this morning also hasn’t failed yet, so logically we should link nuclear launch codes to it collapsing. After all, it seems to be a perfect system.
Or you could try actually thinking about the point GP was making.
So, you have done a trial of one, fir a few hrs, with no testing.
Other human failsafe have been repeatedly tested, thousands of times over, over decades.
Hell, the simple Deadman switch is a human failsafe: hold this latch, otherwise machine stops…
Are you willfully missing the point, or is this accidental?
It’s totally logical even aside from the economics. The consequences are too great, which is why nuclear plants are uninsurable. You think this French plant and Vogtle were expensive? Imagine if they had to be insured like everything else in our society. But they can’t, because no insurance company is large enough. By default the public ends up footing that cost to the tune of trillions.
If you exclude the early phases of nuclear development, and later accidents that happened due to bad management, how dangerous is well run nuclear energy? Maybe it’s not the form of energy generation that’s the problem.
Maybe if the difference between “just an expensive technology” and “deadly disaster impacting the lifes of millions of people” is some bad management and poor regulatory oversight, it is not a technology fit for the use of current humanity.
Personally, drag is pick-your-battles-nuclear. That is to say, scientifically it’s a good technology, but fighting a political battle to get nuclear cheap enough to compete with wind and solar is pointless. Advocating wind and solar is much more efficient in terms of political effort spent.
Depends on context, which I think is missed in basically all these discussions. Solar, wind, and hydropower are obviously contextually dependent technologies, that are well suited to particular environments. They have to line up with energy demand curves, or else impose expensive and inefficient battery solutions. They don’t have a whole lot of efficiency in terms of land use, which there are some proposed solutions for, but they’re pretty efficient both economically, and are pretty ecologically contentious as long as recycling is being done adequately. Nuclear solves a different problem. It provides base load, which is somewhat important, it’s potentially not as flexible as a technology, but it’s easier to build infrastructure for because it’s more consistent. It can also be somewhat land-use agnostic, though things like water use for cooling towers and tradeoffs such as that are definitely a consideration. It’s also much denser in terms of land use, meaning it’s potentially more efficient for larger cities.
They’re both just different technologies, with different applications, and they both have a place in any sensible structuring of the world. I don’t understand why people become so split along the obvious astroturfed and petrol-funded propaganda that floats around for both sides. You have pro-nuclear people that are saying solar panels like, require exotic materials mines, which is insanely ironic, and you have solar people who are fearmongering about solved problems like nuclear waste and safety concerns and efficiency in terms of economic cost, which is also insanely ironic. The fact that this conflict comes up every time strikes me as kind of horrendously stupid and obviously favorable to petrol lobbies.
It’s always Germany’s fault when it comes to nuclear, isn’t it?
Probably not anymore, I think they do very good as just being buyers of it and outsourcing its issues to their neighbors.
In the second half of 2022 Germany had to export a lot of energy to France, because french nuclear power plants are so poorly run that a lot of them had to be taken off network at the same time.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-extends-power-exports-neighbours-2023-01-05/
France failing to diversify its energy production is not a failure of Germany or any other country though.
What a misleading cherry picking, this was an exceptional event due to:
As mentioned by the other comment, it has been the other way around for the previous 4 years and will very likely be the case too for this year and for the next years. Not only to Germany, but all inter-connected countries too, UK, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium are benefiting from this stable source. This is not a competition, it’s a good thing Europe can work together with each other strength to make the grid more sustainable. The sudden shift of Germany against nuclear, which increased its electricity dependency on gas, coal and Russia, was not a good for Europe, and not only for energitical reasons. I hope Germany will be able to reduce this dependency as fast as possible and I am happy that French nuclear will contribute to it.
Which exposed a systemic risk of a nuclear focused energy production. Also the energy crisis would have indicated Germany to need more imports. On the contrary the French Nuclear industry failure was so bad, that despite all of it, Germany had to export energy to France.
And why did it make the news when Germany is exporting electricity to France ? Because in 2023, 2021, 2020, 2019 … Germany has been importing electricity from France.
So the poor management of France nuclear power blew a hole into Europes energy production so big, that it out-competed the effects of the Russian invasion.