EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.

> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop. You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond. Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions. Decommissioning could be a little cheaper with laxer standards, but it’s never going to be cheap. Etc etc.

Worse, all those capital costs mean you’re selling most of your output 24/7 at generally low wholesale spot prices unlike hydro, natural gas, or battery backed solar which can benefit from peak pricing.

That’s not regulations that’s just inherent requirements for the underlying technology. People talk about small modular reactors, but small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully. Similarly the vast majority of regulations come from lessons learned so yea they spend a lot of effort avoiding foreign materials falling into the spent fuel pool, but failing to do so can mean months of downtime and tens of millions in costs so there isn’t some opportunity to save money by avoiding that regulation.

This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.

Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.

People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

If one tries to quantify the value of those deaths, using the "statistical value of a human life" (somewhere around $12M/death), one finds in the case of both wind/solar and nuclear, using those numbers, the value of those lives contributes negligibly to the cost of energy. This is unlike with coal.

This means that in choosing between solar/wind and nuclear, one cannot use the deaths/TWh to choose between them unless they are almost dead even in other costs (and they are not).

Aye, but with the amount of coal plants still running, I think the choice is between solar+nuclear or solar+coal

I don't think anyone is arguing nuclear instead of solar. It's both. We need both.

No, I don't think we need both. In particular, building new nuclear plants would be worse than just putting all that money into renewables + storage. The latter displaces fossil fuels more quickly and more cheaply.

As someone who's lived at latitude 52N, I can tell you for a fact that solar isn't always an option.

You might think wind is a good alternative, but Greta Thunberg will vehemently protest that notion [1](and she's got a point, believe it or not)

We have more hydro per capita than almost anywhere in the world, and that's still not enough!

Sure, if you live near the equator, you can get all the power you need by putting solar panels on your roof.

If you don't.... Nuclear is the best option.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/12/greta-thunberg-and...