EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that.

> Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop.

You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.

> You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond.

Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?

> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.

This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change.

But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?

Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.

So yeah. Regulation.

Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". (and this was just a radiation source, not a nuclear plant)

So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.

I think what is missing in your argument is not that these pieces are difficult. It's that combining all of them adds to a significant amount of complexity.

It's not JUST a heat exchanger. It's a heat exchanger that has to go through shielding. And it has to operate at much higher pressures than another type of power production facility would use. Which adds more complexity. And even greater need of safety.

I'm not arguing against Nuclear; I think it's incredibly worthwhile especially in the current age of AI eating up so much power in a constant use situation. But I do think it needs to be extremely regulated due to the risks of things going south.

Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments on fuel matter.

> You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.

It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems, loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.

> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.

> Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?

Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway. It’s also impractical for a bunch of other reasons.

> But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?

No nuclear power plants has ever actually been required to carry a policy with that kind of a payout. Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.

However, the lesser risk of losing the reactor is still quite substantial. You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.

So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.

However, that was a result of faulty assumptions made when the plant was initially planned. With better data and methods, the event would have seemed a lot more likely.

Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.

But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.

> It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems

These things should all costs thousands of dollars, not billions of dollars.

> loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.

These are operating costs rather than construction costs and are already accounted for in the comparison of fuel costs.

> Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.

5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant. We both know which one costs more -- and highways themselves cost more than they should because the government overpays for everything.

> Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway.

Is this actually a problem? It's not a truck full of gamma emitters, it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source. Isn't this solvable with a lead-lined box?

> Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.

Have taxpayers actually paid anything here at all? The power plants have paid more in premiums than they've ever filed in claims, haven't they?

> You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.

You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day. You could hypothetically build a single wind turbine that shorts out and starts a massive wildfire.

> it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source

This isn't how radiation works. Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source. Contamination refers to radioactive emitters being somewhere they don't belong.

There is this thing called neutron activation.

But the elephant in the room is of course that coal plants emitted way more radioactivity than nuclear ones even taking into account every disaster on even non-power generation plants.

I consider myself reasonably pro nuclear, but this is just like some developer going:

“Oh yeah, that doesn't seem that hard, I could probably implement that in a weekend”

Fact: hard complicated things are expensive.

There is no “just it’s just some concrete…”.

That is, translated “I do not know what Im talking about”.

Hard things, which require constant, high level, technical maintenance…

Are very expensive.

Theyre expensive to build. Theyre expensive to operate. Theyre expensive to decommission.

Theres no magic wand to fix this.

You can drive down the unit cost sometimes by doing things at scale, but Im not sure that like 100 units, or even say 1000 units can do that meaningfully.

…and how how are we planning on having the 100000s of reactors that you would need for that?

Micro reactors? Im not convinced.

Certainly, right now, the costs are not artificial; if you think they are, I would argue you havent done your due diligence in research.

Heres the point:

Making complicated things cheaper doesnt just magically happen by removing regulations. Thats naive.

You need a concrete plan to either a) massively simplify the technology or b) massively scale the production.

Which one? (a) and (b) both seem totally out of reach to me, without massive state sponsored funding.

…which, apparently no one likes either.

Its this frustrating dilemma where idiots (eg. former Australian government) claim they can somehow magically deliver things (multiple reactors) super cheaply.

…but there is no reality to this promise; its just morons trying to buy regional votes and preserve the status quo with coal.

Real nuclear progress needs realistic plans, not hopes and dreams.

Nuclear power is better; but it is more expensive than many other options, and probably, will continue to be if all we do is hope it somehow becomes easy and cheap by doing basically nothing.

Nuclear is inherently vastly more complicated requiring more maintenance, manpower, etc per KW of capacity and thus has more operational costs. A 50+ year lifespan means keeping 50+ year old designs in operation which plays a significant role in costs here.

> 5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant.

A cooling tower isn’t dealing with any radioactivity and it’s not a safety critical system yet it’s still difficult to build and thus way more expensive per cubic foot of concrete than a typical surface road. When road projects get complicated they can quickly get really expensive just look at bridges or tunnels.

> You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day.

Hydroelectric dams have directly saved more lives than they have cost due to flood control. The electricity bit isn’t even needed in many cases as people build dams because they are inherently useful. Society is willing to carry those risks in large part because they get a direct benefit.

Wind turbines are closer and do sometimes fail early, but they just don’t cost nearly as much so the public doesn’t need to subsidize insurance here.

Nuclear power plants need shielding to avoid their workforce being killed off very quickly. Obviously safety standards are much higher than that, but significant shielding is inherently necessary.

“On Tuesday, January 3, 1961, SL-1 was being prepared for restart after a shutdown of 11 days over the holidays. Maintenance procedures required that rods be manually withdrawn a few inches to reconnect each one to its drive mechanism. At 9:01 pm MST, Rod 9 was suddenly withdrawn too far, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical instantly. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize.”

The industry didn’t just randomly get so risk averse there where a lot of meltdowns and other issues over time.

You’re much better off paying attention to site placement than trying to design something to safety handle getting covered in several meters of volcanic ash Pompeii style.

Was New York City really at risk? Citation needed.

Don't put the emergency diesel generators in the basement where they are certain to be flooded if the tsunami wall is too low. Also, don't build too low tsunami walls.

> So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.

No. Hydropower has.

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

Take this stupid accident, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic#2007_Scaled_Co...

> In July 2007, three Scaled Composites employees were killed and three critically injured at the Mojave spaceport while testing components of the rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo. An explosion occurred during a cold fire test, which involved nitrous oxide flowing through fuel injectors. The procedure had been expected to be safe.

N2O is very good oxidizer + it's a molecule that can fall apart (and turn into N2 and O2) in a very exothermic way if you look at it wrong.

Oops.

Back to SL-1. Nobody was killed by radiation. They were killed by things hitting them hard from the explosion.

> The effort to minimize the size of the core gave an abnormally-large reactivity worth to Rod 9, the center control rod.

> One of the required maintenance procedures called for Rod 9 to be manually withdrawn about four inches (10 cm) in order to attach it to the automated control mechanism from which it had been disconnected. Post-accident calculations, as well as examination of scratches on Rod 9, estimate that it had actually been withdrawn about twenty inches (51 cm), causing the reactor to go prompt critical and triggering the steam explosion.

and:

> At SL-1, control rods would sometimes get stuck in the control rod channel. Numerous procedures were conducted to evaluate control rods to ensure they were operating properly. There were rod drop tests and scram tests of each rod, in addition to periodic rod exercising and rod withdrawals for normal operation. From February 1959 to November 18, 1960, there were 40 cases of a stuck control rod for scram and rod drop tests and about a 2.5% failure rate. From November 18 to December 23, 1960, there was a dramatic increase in stuck rods, with 23 in that time period and a 13.0% failure rate. Besides these test failures, there were an additional 21 rod-sticking incidents from February 1959 to December 1960; four of these had occurred in the last month of operation during routine rod withdrawal. Rod 9 had the best operational performance record even though it was operated more frequently than any of the other rods.

That is insane.

Renewables are forcing enormous amounts of coals and fossil gas off grids around the world as we speak.

What's the relevance of this?

Except in uncle Donald’s kingdom with “America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry” (yes, seriously):

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...

Coal has been uncompetitive since the advent of the CCGT plant and was stagnating long before the fracking boom.

Hindsight plus other people doing the analysis always makes things seem more obvious.

The people designing this system were not trying to kill the operators. They made tradeoffs that seemed reasonable at the time and then things failed badly because something unexpected happened. The only way to avoid that is to be extremely cautious which then feeds back to nuclear being expensive.

Risk aversion gets expensive, but so does taking risks. That’s the nuclear dilemma. It seems reasonable to say just take more risks, but that’s how you get accidents that people look back on and think how could they be so dumb.

Unfortunately, there is a country that shut down nuclear power plants while they still have operating coal plants. Over time, coal use is declining in Germany, but that isn't the story so far in 2025:

>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office

>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...

Shutting nuclear power plants down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable... I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.

We can only look forward and make sure we spend our money wisely. We also need to decarbonize aviation, shipping, agriculture, industry, construction etc. The grid is not the end, it is only the beginning of our decarbonization journey.

The fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of quickly displacing fossil based energy production today is building renewables and storage.

It would be one thing if Germany's bad mistakes in this area only affected Germany. Unfortunately people downwind of Germany die because it is still burning coal. Unfortunately climate change will affect everyone.

>...We also need to decarbonize aviation, shipping, agriculture, industry, construction etc. The grid is not the end,

Many of the changes needed to decarbonize those industries will rely on using electricity, so the grid is critical.

>...The fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of quickly displacing fossil based energy production today is building renewables and storage.

We will see if Germany is still burning coal and natural gas when countries like Finland are not.

That would mean they get a fraction of the capacity (in TWh) online and the people downwind of Germany would have to live with the emissions as they stand today without any abatement until the mid 2040s.

Does that sound reasonable?

- Restart the nuclear power plants that are feasible to restart. The last 3 plants were only shut down in 2023 - it isn't like all the plants were shut down in 2011. It may very well be that Germany doesn’t feel it has the expertise to run nuclear power plants in the long term, so once the power isn’t needed or can be replaced by clean energy (either produced in Germany or imported), feel free to shut down the nuclear plants.

- Work with Denmark and France to import more of their power that is not coal based.

- Reward conservation more.

- Move the big industrial users of electricity out of Germany.

Some of these alternatives are likely not palatable, but like I said, Germany dug itself into a hole. Any of these alternatives sounds better than essentially deciding instead to murder people by burning coal when you have other options.

The German grid is currently constrained north-south due to limited transmission capacity. Over production of renewables in the north and over consumption in the south.

The reactors the pro-nuclear lobby in Germany identified as ”most easily restartable” are in the north.

Therefore restarting them is a pure waste of money. It does not solve any problems Germany has with its grid.

Then it comes down to the cost question. You can maintain a piece of infrastructure forever but at some point the costs does not justify the gain. Better spend the money on renewables and storage instead.

An example of such stupidity is Diablo Canyon in California requiring a $12B subsidy on top of regular income for selling electricity to run 5 extra years from 2025 to 2030.

You do know that France is on a downward trend of nuclear power as well? Reactors are entering end of life and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

It’s worth considering, but not in that context.

Well I guess it is impossible to upgrade the grid in any kind of reasonable timeframe in Germany. There are still other options that could be done to hasten the end of burning coal - I pointed out a few, there are likely others.

>Then it comes down to the cost question. You can maintain a piece of infrastructure forever but at some point the costs does not justify the gain. Better spend the money on renewables and storage instead.

Yes it is a question. Unfortunately you have given no evidence of the actual costs.

>...You do know that France is on a downward trend of nuclear power as well?

In 2014 France set a goal to reduce nuclear's share of electricity generation to 50% by 2025. This target was delayed in 2019 to 2035, before being abandoned in 2023. (I am sure France is also trying to increase renewables and storage.)

>An example of such stupidity is Diablo Canyon in California requiring a $12B subsidy on top of regular income for selling electricity to run 5 extra years from 2025 to 2030.

This comment shows you don't really grasp the issue of power in CA. The 12 billion dollar estimate included costs unrelated to Diablo Canyon according to PG&E. Their estimate is closer to 8B, of which the majority will be covered by selling the electricity. They have a 1.1 billion dollar grant to help with some of the rest, though unclear how much the state will have to subsidize things in the end. The issue is that Diablo Canyon provides about 1/4 of the clean power in CA and can provide it when renewables can't - like every other place, CA currently has a tiny amount of grid storage. Without Diablo Canyon, CA will likely have to buy power from coal plants in other states. So CA is willing to pay extra to avoid having to burn coal. That is different than Germany that decided it would rather burn coal than use nuclear.

We will see when Germany actually stops during fossil fuels. Unfortunately, there certainly do seem to be some advocates of solar/wind who would prefer to go decades (or maybe much longer) burning coal and killing people and destroying the environment when their country had the option to use a clean energy source.

For evidence have a read:

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2024/06/pge-quietly-s...

Just keep hiking the rates in a monopolized system. All good!

You do know that California in recent years has cut fossil gas usage by 40% due to storage? Many evenings batteries are the largest producer in the Californian grid for hours on end. Happened yesterday for example.

But batteries are of course insignificant. Just delivering the equivalent to 8 nuclear reactors pretty much removing the duck curve.

I suggest you update your worldview to 2025.

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

It is only non-urgent if a country wants to minimize the people it is killing by recklessly burning coal. Otherwise, no big deal.

>…For evidence have a read:

Yes I had seen that. Which is why I wrote:

>>…The 12 billion dollar estimate included costs unrelated to Diablo Canyon according to PG&E. Their estimate is closer to 8B, of which the majority will be covered by selling the electricity. They have a 1.1 billion dollar grant to help with some of the rest, though unclear how much the state will have to subsidize things in the end.

CA battery capacity has had better growth than I thought. Though there is obviously a difference between batteries to provide power for a few hours a day and a plant that would provide power 24/7. Diablo Canyon provides close to 18,000 GWh per year of clean power. If that goes away this year, it will obviously take a while to be able to replace the power with other clean power.

Countries don’t actually minimize anything largely due to diminishing returns. Hell the US has lost many nuclear weapons, that’s the kind of thing that seems like it should be a much larger priority but all budgets end up being finite.

> a plant that would provide power 24/7

Solar + batteries provide more electricity in CA than nuclear for roughly 16 hours a day. Midnight to 5AM demand is so low they are actually charging grid batteries, something that could be cheaply time shifted to daytime solar if demand actually increased. New nuclear just doesn’t fit especially if it’s taking 4+ years to build.