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Rafa Font's avatar

Thanks for this very detailed article.

I feel you have missed some things, though, mostly about the operational part.

"Nuclear doesn't need to be that expensive", but it is. It also takes a very long time to build a plant. And it can only be switched on once it's finished (unlike solar, where you can switch on one row of panels at a time).

We have the recent example of Olkiluoto 3, in Finland. The contractor went bankrupt. In Vogtle, in the US, the contractor, Westinghouse, went bankrupt. You point to South Korea, which is true, they have the industry knowledge, they build the same type of reactor all the time. But for instance, Europe is not South Korea. I analyse in further detail in this article the last 20 years of nuclear building in Europe: https://europeanperspective.substack.com/p/schedules-costs-and-risks-of-new

"We don't need to depend on dubious countries", but we do. Nuclear plants in Eastern Europe, which have been built under a soviet design, need soviet fuel and they had to buy it from Russia. It's been very difficult for western suppliers to provide fuel (not sure if that's solved now).

On top of that, most of the nuclear knowledge in the world comes from Russia, from the national company Rosatom. Rosatom is building nuclear in Turkey, are we OK with this? Look at Finland, they cancelled one plant in progress because 30% of the ownership was Russian.

Missing Rosatom and Russia's role is one of the main shortcomings I find in this article.

"We could build wherever", but we can't. You still need to find a location as far as possible from fault lines and possible earthquake-risk areas.

All in all, if I had a lot of money to invest, in Europe, and I wanted to generate electricity, I would not go for an option in which the continent industry doesn't have experience, or good track record, and that it would take many years to generate the first Kw (if it ever does).

Plus, decommissioning plants, which needs to be done, and it's extremely expensive and time-consuming. Calder Hall in the UK will be decommissioned one hundred years for now (if things go according to plan).

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Geoffrey G's avatar

You completely missed a crucial aspect of reliability: how often nuclear plants are offline. This matters a lot when your grid relies on them and you don't (and really can't, practically) have a lot of redundancy. In the last few years, France's reactors have famously been offline for crucial months even as energy crises have ravaged Europe, throwing the electricity sector in the rest of Western Europe into chaos. Here in Sweden, we have four operational reactors and two of them were offline last week, during an unseasonable cold-snap. Electricity prices shot up 7x overnight. Even Finland's brand-new nuclear plant (TWO DECADES in the making and billions over budget) has been offline many times this year, again, shooting up prices.

People love to talk about how renewables are unreliable, but the inconvenient truth is that *all* power sources are unreliable. Including (and especially) fossil fuel generator plants. And nuclear is no exception. And the problem with nuclear power, especially, is that it is so expensive and capital-intensive to build and uneconomical to just switch on and off, so you aren't going to build more than your baseline load. So, when your reactor's down, you don't have a backup. When dozens are down (as in the case of France recently), you are in real trouble.

Nuclear power is no panacea: It take a very long time to construct, it's extremely challenging to finance, it requires a lot of complicated maintenance even to keep running (much less run with optimal safety), and it is vulnerable to extreme weather, too.

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