Are you serious when putting France in this list? Nuclear is such a cash cow here that EDF manage to make profits even while being forced by the regulator to sell a big fraction of its nuclear capacity below the operating cost and buying it back to them at market price! (We're talking about a multi-billon subsidies scheme, look for ARENH).

And that is despite (rather legitimate IMHO) regulatory constraints that have no equivalent in any other industry.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY

Here's an Illinois professor going through the economics compared to a gas plant.

Nuclear power can become dramatically cheaper than other energy sources in the long run.

If energy prices are too high, industry suffers. If you let the price rise, maybe China just eats your lunch.

What's the option value vs risk of gas price rises? Gas sets the marginal price of electricity in Italy today for 60% of the year [1]

[1] https://www.terna.it/DesktopModules/AdactoBackend/API/direct... "However, the electricity system remains significantly exposed to gas price volatility, which in 2024 determined electricity prices for more than 60% of the hours."

> That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.

Spot on. That, plus... peak oil.

If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful. I think that's what we're talking about here.

Electricity is super-duper easy to measure the individual benefits of, so profit is a really simple and easy way to measure the overall effective economic benefit. It's not perfect though - there are external costs to consider which aren't paid for directly, but we have lots of experience with that across all sorts of industries and usually solve for that via taxes and regulation, which become part of the profit equation.

There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.

If safe is your metric, nuclear power kills fewer people than roof top solar.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

Is the Italian coastline at high risk of tsunamis as well?

I would say near Pisa, on the Arno River.

Judging from the map, Piedmont, Liguria, Trentino, Tuscany and Basilicata have good sites.

This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.

The uranium needs to be regularly replaced. Europe currently imports virtually all of the uranium used by its nuclear power plants. While Europe has some decommissioned uranium mines, they would have to be reopened, but the known deposits are estimated to cover less than the 50 years you cite, at current levels of nuclear production (much less when expanding production).

So if this is about energy independence rather than cost, I’m not sure that it would be such a great win.

That's not true. It's extremely expensive to operate for one, so expensive in fact that nobody in the private sector wants to do it without having nation states basically guarantee profits for the lifetime of the plant or accept all liability. Which in several countries means that he operator is the nation state. Like in France.

The profits are guaranteed by collecting extra taxes from the population, not by increasing the price of electricity. Which is why people believe France has cheap electricity when they really don't.

Also of course each nuclear plant carries a nonzero chance of a trillion dollar incident (we've had two so far) as well as a nonzero chance of millions of casualties. Both these cons are entirely unique to nuclear power plants. No hydro plant, solar plant, wind farm, coal, oil or gas plant can cause as much damage as a nuclear plant.

>t's that or buying gas from Russia.

Not at all, there are many options (including buying gas from someone else). Some options got viable so recently people still haven't realized it. Like batteries. They're cheap now, you know, and China can build as many as we want. China has also caused a severe drop in the cost of hydrolyzers, used to create e-fuel. E-fuel means you can use solar power in winter and during night, which removes the remaining weakness of renewable sources. Europe should spend every eurocent in that direction instead of nuclear. That's the path to true energy independence.

And anyway, europe still gets 70% of it's nuclear fuel from Russia. How is that better than gas?

It takes billions to certify a nuclear power plant, and it takes billions more to re-certify it every few decades, to say nothing of the costs of modernization.

To be clear, I consider myself generally pro-nuclear power, but let's not ignore the massive upfront and ongoing capital and operational costs that really undermine this idea that it's free power.

I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.

Trivially. If we push hard, more than three orders of magnitude are possible (even for overall energy use, which is itself around an order of magnitude more than electricity), even without launching anything to orbit.

IMO it's much better if we go to space after the first of those orders of magnitude, rather than pursuing K1 on the ground.

> I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.

Solar is as likely as fission to lead to either of these things. Each of the four is a different beast.

Solar is also the only way to scale up to a K2, which would trivially obviate both even when the ships' primary propulsion is solar (laser) sails.

Why?

What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?

Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?

That being said, it seems finally solar+wind+storage+a little bit of other stuff is becoming cheap enough that it's starting to make a dent in the emissions. Which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's also sad we've lost decades.

In contrast, SMRs are being sold as something that you can weld together in your garage and use them as a replacement for your water heater. And you don't need all those large containment structures and gigawatt-scale turbines.

This makes it much easier to get funding, as you don't need to show that you have a firm agreement with all the suppliers.

I don't like this at all, but it _might_ result in us regaining some experience in building nuclear power plants.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzevzwxwro

I couldn't find immediate investments from Kushner etc., but will dig further.