Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power. I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?

• toomuchtodo · 14 hours ago

  Time and demographics are also a component. Italy is old, has worker shortages for living wage work (and is currently issuing ~500k work visas over three years to attract labor to the market), and a new nuclear generator takes at least ten years to build. Each year, an additional 1TW of solar will be deployed globally. Solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled. https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/italy/ > 49% of Italy’s electricity was generated from low-carbon sources in 2025, below the EU average of 71%. As of 1 January 2026, Italy was aiming for 69% of renewable electricity generation by 2030. For the country’s latest renewables targets, see our 2030 Global Renewable Target Tracker. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/IT/fifteen_minutes Record 2026 summer heat impaired nuclear generation in France, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, so I'd be curious how they intend to solve for that as the climate continues to warm (reduced capacity factor from reduced output due to cooling constraints impairs the economics). France to Upgrade Heat Wave Modeling After Record Nuclear Curbs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790006 - September 2026 Europe's Heatwaves Are Putting Nuclear Power Under Pressure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49466909 - August 2026 Bulgaria's Nuclear Plant Plans First Output Cut Due to Low Danube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376860 - August 2026 Record heat is drying up Europe's major rivers, as these striking images show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49283344 - August 2026 Bloomberg: Hungary Casts Doubt on Nuclear Plant Expansion After Danube Low Levels - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/hungary-c... - August 13th, 2026 Italy to issue half million non-EU work visas over next three years - https://www.reuters.com/world/italy-issue-half-million-non-e... - June 30th, 2025

• citrin_ru · 14 hours ago

  > I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. Solar is 15% - a lot but not yet dominated. Solar works at day and demand is also highest during the day so solar should not be an enemy of nuclear.

  • dalyons · 14 hours ago

    It is actually an enemy of nuclear, economically. Solar is so cheap, it will naturally grow until it satisfies 100% of the daytime load. This pushes nuclear off the grid during the day - it’s power costs too much. But nukes need to be running and selling at 100% 24/7 to have any chance of breaking even. This is what the OP means - they make no economic sense on most modern grids.

    • toomuchtodo · 14 hours ago

      Citation: France's EDF Warns Solar, Wind Surge Straining Nuclear Fleet Costs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037839 - February 2026 https://web.archive.org/web/20260217122120/https://www.edf.f... Related: Wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener... - January 22nd, 2026 > Wind and solar overtaking fossil fuels in 2025 can be largely attributed to a staggering rise in solar power. Solar grew by more than a fifth (+20.1%) for the fourth year running. It generated a record 13% of EU power in 2025, above both coal and hydro. This trend was widespread: all EU countries saw growth in solar generation compared to the year before, amid a huge expansion in EU solar installations. Solar provided more than a fifth of electricity in Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands. Renewables provided nearly half of EU power (48%) as unusual weather conditions caused hydro generation to fall by 12% and wind by 2%, but boosted solar generation. Wind remained the second largest EU electricity source at 17% of EU power, generating more than gas. Signs of a structural shift are clear across the EU, as wind and solar generated more electricity than all fossil sources in 14 of the 27 EU countries in 2025. Over the past five years, wind and solar have experienced massive growth (from 20% in 2020 to 30% in 2025). Fossil fuels have fallen from 37% to 29% in the same period, while hydro and nuclear remained stable or slightly declined. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... (installed solar energy capacity goes brrr)

• rayiner · 14 hours ago

  We need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. Does solar offer a pathway to doing that today, once you account for the costs of battery storage? Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships.

  • adrianN · 14 hours ago

    To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here. I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.

    • neutronicus · 12 hours ago

      > I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree. I mean, you need to radiation-harden your structural materials and electronics for both fission and fusion, and some hypothetical antimatter reactor is probably using an evolutionary version of EM confinement techniques from fusion. But, yes, fission reactors are ultimately kind of ooga-booga (put a pile of metal in some water and run a steam engine) that's hard to characterize as on track for something sci-fi like an antimatter reactor.

  • wat10000 · 14 hours ago

    Total world energy usage is about 1/10,000 what the sun provides. Bumping that up an order of magnitude means 1/1,000 instead. Seems reasonable for solar. I don’t see research into fission power doing anything useful for spacecraft. The big bottleneck right now is getting stuff to orbit. The rest is easy, relatively speaking. And getting stuff to orbit is not practical with nuclear unless you use something like Orion, which has some downsides to put it mildly, and is already doable with 1950s tech.

  • diarrhea · 14 hours ago

    > upgrade civilization to the next level Why?

    • someonebaggy · 11 hours ago

      Civilisational levels are defined by orders of magnitude in energy use.

    • rangestransform · 5 hours ago

      Practically, at the current rate of CO2 emissions we’re going to be needing that electricity to do carbon capture eventually

    • Gareth321 · 2 hours ago

      If you're asking why we would want to progress as a species, I suppose that's a rather subjective question. I like the idea of materially improving the lives of humans. That includes scientific discoveries, curing ageing and other diseases, space exploration and interplanetary colonisation, material abundance like unlimited food, etc. We don't achieve this unless we make major technological advancements, and this requires major new sources of energy.

  • Hikikomori · 14 hours ago

    Is musk's stream of consciousness leaking?

    • dguest · 13 hours ago

      I don't think we should let musk appropriate nerdy space dreams. Hand him the nerds and you'll hand him the future, for better or worse.

      • rayiner · 13 hours ago

        Getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue.

        • vrganj · 12 hours ago

          Star Trek is a socialist society. Getting the tech without the social change first (e.g. what Musk et al are going for) gets you a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a post-scarcity utopia.

          • rayiner · 12 hours ago

            You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards. It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy.

            • vrganj · 12 hours ago

              I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged. I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity. You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.

              • rayiner · 11 hours ago

                Your theory is contrary to the evidence of history. Technological progress makes people more free, not less. 500 years ago, you would have been a serf and your life would be literally worthless. In much of the undeveloped world, that’s still true.

                • someonebaggy · 11 hours ago

                  What's my life worth now?

                • 43187 · 11 hours ago

                  And 30 years ago you could still afford a house. Tech helped people up until the internet, then it started to enslave them and make them poorer. All new energy initiatives should be nationalized and out of the hands of the tech robber barons.

                • vrganj · 2 hours ago

                  The industrial revolution begot the labor movement, which is what caused greater freedom. It could do that because of the dependence on labor for production, or in other words leverage over the ownership class. If we accelerate technology to the point where we sever this dependency, all those freedoms will no longer have the leverage required to extract them. Our lives didn't become not worthless because of the steam machine. They became not worthless because of leverage over capital reproduction, and once that's gone they may well become worthless again. Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.

                  • Gareth321 · 2 hours ago

                    I think you're both right in different ways. Some labour movements were not dependent on technological advancement. Some technological advancements materially and independently improved the lives of people. The contraceptive pill gave women much greater control over the timing of pregnancy. [Its diffusion substantially affected women's investment in professional careers and the timing of marriage.]( https://www.nber.org/papers/w7527 ) Medical and reproductive technologies played an important role in increasing married women's ability to participate in paid work. Those are changes in actual individual choice brought about, in significant part, by technology. However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first.

                    • vrganj · 1 hour ago

                      So I think abundance completely changes the game and I think we can all agree on that. I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity. Labor will no longer be required for their productive needs, so that handful of people that controls the abundance machines will no longer have any incentive to keep the rest of humanity satisfied, or even alive for that matter. In other words, if we don't change social relations before we get to this state, we will end up in a world where the Musks, Bezos and Zucks of this world control all material production, with the rest of us reduced to being dependent on their charity. Personally, that sounds like the worst dystopia imaginable. I will give you that prior attempts at socialism weren't necessarily successful and a lot of people died, however, I also think that argument requires holding one eye shut. People are dying from capitalism right now . There's a homeless guy in SoMa that is breathing his last breath as we speak. There's entire villages in Africa that can't afford clean water while Nestle sells it in plastic bottles that pollute our planet. The status quo is not without its own violence and I think that is a point that too often gets swept under the rug. Either way though, I think even if I were to concede that capitalism historically had better outcomes (which I have not been fully sold on! it's positives have just been more articulated imo, but that's another debate.), we are in a critical moment right now . If we really believe we're to transition into a post-scarcity world, we need to make sure the right social relations are in place before that happens and whatever we have right now is locked in forever. All criticism of socialism's supposed productive ineffectiveness becomes irrelevant once the transition is done anyways.

                      • Gareth321 · 1 hour ago

                        > I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity. It's a valid concern. We use democracy right now to address inequality. Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources? To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all. Perhaps this is more of a regional risk? There are some nations which culturally value individuality. I'm not sure the U.S. would build national abundance machines. I think I broadly agree with your thesis, however. Abundance is going to force massive social change. If goods and services are effectively free, most jobs disappear. So too does their income and consumer demand, which destroys the entire premise of capitalism. You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about. When Middle American manufacturing jobs were offshored to China, Hilary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." I fear many more people whose jobs are lost to AI will be met with similar derision. It is only when things get very bad that change will occur. The Star Trek timeline describes this collapse between 2020s-2053.

                        • vrganj · 1 hour ago

                          > Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources? Even though I'm not too concerned about that specifically, that is clearly a plan they have. [0] > To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all. I'm not worried about the knowledge . I'm worried about the material conditions . These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs. > You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about. I, too, am worried about the transition, but for different reasons. I believe Elon when he says he believes capitalism will end in a few decades. However, I don't think he has prosperity for all in mind and that end state won't just naturally happen by itself. I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity. That, to me, is the core transition risk we need to manage. We need to make sure abundance machines aren't just a device for completely centralizing power in the hands of a few. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%B3spera

                          • Gareth321 · 28 minutes ago

                            > I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs. I understand. I place less weight into this risk. The current AI supply chain is so globally interdependent that it has effectively distributed itself beyond centralised control. China has received the full weight of global chip sanctions and still somehow manages to provide competitive coding models using either grey imports, offshore cloud compute, or locally produced chips. It would be very difficult (and I would argue almost impossible) for a nation and especially an individual/company to seize ownership of the entire supply chain and prevent everyone else in the world from producing their own AI/chips/abundance machines. > I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity. No doubt many people in positions of power are megalomaniacs. This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders.

        • 31aHgd · 11 hours ago

          I would not want to walk in pajamas on a sterile spacecraft and deal with new aliens every week.

          • adrianN · 5 hours ago

            Only a tiny fraction of the Federation's population is part of Star Fleet. There are only a few thousand star ships scattered over thousands of light years. Crew complements are rather small, so at most a single-digit million people are on Star Fleet ships. That's comparable to the size of just the current US military personnel but the Federation has hundreds of planets and many billions of people.

  • Zigurd · 13 hours ago

    Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector. Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.

    • rayiner · 13 hours ago

      > The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book. My mom is in her mid 70s and grew up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a child in Bangladesh. She still imagines a Star Trek future is inevitable. If anything it’s Gen Z that has a small and narrow vision of what’s possible.

      • hollerith · 6 hours ago

        Some of us don't share your faith in technological progress. And sometimes I think Star Trek did more damage to the world than Das Kapital did.

    • 31aHgd · 11 hours ago

      It isn't about space travel. The AI boosters use it as a pretext for powering more data centers.

      • Zigurd · 7 hours ago

        And the nuclear power boosters, especially the SMR fans, are riding in the data center slipstream. All kinds of debunked ideas have seen a chance for revival in the AI bubble. I'm no fun because I've spent a lot of time doing critical path analysis in projects. A lot of planned data centers will never power up because the lead time for gas turbines is a few years now. You can't expect the first SMR to power a data center to come online with in 10 years. And while Bloom has done impressive work making a credible methane fuel cell, they have only a slim chance of scaling up their production to power the big Oracle data center in New Mexico. There is an exasperating amount of BS to call out on this planet even before we get to wild promises of what's going to be put into orbit or on the moon or on Mars,

    • zahlman · 10 hours ago

      This is not how people are expected to converse on HN.

      • martin_a · 9 hours ago

        We should be able to call out bullshit if we see it.

  • vrganj · 12 hours ago

    > upgrade civilization to the next level 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?

  • chrystalkey · 10 hours ago

    What does "Upgrade to the next level" even mean? What next level? Where is the dividing line? Why should we, beside all other concerns there are?

• drnick1 · 14 hours ago

  > certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power. Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, and it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. Once the power plant is built, it provides 50+ years of nearly free energy. It's that or buying gas from Russia.

  • adrianN · 14 hours ago

    Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.

  • dalyons · 14 hours ago

    Yes no real cons if we exclude the small con of being completely economically unviable.

  • fl0id · 14 hours ago

    How about nuclear fuel still being dependent on either russia or us? and that is just one reason.

    • someonebaggy · 11 hours ago

      Conspiracy hat time: I think this is the main reason it's being pushed so hard. The US and Russia feel threatened by the rise of renewables and will do anything to get countries dependent on them again.

      • drnick1 · 8 hours ago

        This isn't right, in fact one of the main reasons for building nuclear power plants is independence from politically unstable places like Russia and the Mideast.

        • someonebaggy · 7 hours ago

          From where does uranium come?

          • AngryData · 3 hours ago

            There are some better mines in different areas of course, but it is available across most of the planet. Processing it is way harder than finding a source of it, but that is also a solved problem, you just gotta put in the capital to build it.

    • sien · 9 hours ago

      It's not. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... Orano and Urenco are European and have massive enrichment capability. Canada, Australia and Namibia have massive Uranium reserves. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

  • layer8 · 14 hours ago

    > it should be a no brainer for a place like Europe without significant energy resources. 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.

    • icantevenhold · 13 hours ago

      Idk we can import uranium from lots of places; i think currently mostly from Canada. But I just don’t get why it’s being discussed at all - its obviously so much more expensive and time consuming to build than the alternatives

    • philipkglass · 13 hours ago

      Nuclear fuel rods get used for 1-2 years before they need to be replaced. This is much longer than it takes to burn a shipload of liquefied natural gas, though it's much shorter than it takes for solar panels or grid scale batteries to need replacement. Both nuclear energy and renewable energy are less sensitive to supply shocks than fossil energy, even if Europe doesn't reduce the percentage of its energy needs that depend on imports.

      • layer8 · 13 hours ago

        Yes, but the parent was implying 50+ years of nothing to worry about once a plant is built.

        • AngryData · 11 hours ago

          It would cost a bit more is the worst case if you had to build your own centerfuges, uranium is not all that rare. And a single ship could carry a decades worth of fuel (not that I recommend a decade of fuel on a single ship), so even if shipping was costly it would be cheap compared to the actual fuel refinement. You couldn't Hormuz a uranium fuel supply because it doesn't take thousands of ships or miles of pipeline to deliver. So maybe not worry free, but if you are able to run nuclear reactors for power to start with, obtaining fuel for them in any scenario shouldn't be impossible. You got atleast a year or two lead time between refuelings, and it might be able to be stretched a little longer in an emergency. And even more time if you hold some in reserve.

    • Emma_Goldman · 13 hours ago

      Australia and Canada are top producers of uranium ore, and uranium ore is a small fraction of total lifecycle costs. Given a ~2 year refuelling cycle and the possibility of stockpiling uranium, this is very far from an interruption to oil and gas flows - which you need a continuous supply of. Security isn't just a function of autarkic raw material supplies.

    • Moldoteck · 7 minutes ago

      There are many more deposits to explore, like Sweden. And we can start doing purex+mox recycling to extend operation further

  • _verandaguy · 13 hours ago

    Cost of deployment is a massive consideration in our not-yet-post-scarcity society. 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.

    • someonebaggy · 11 hours ago

      What if we just skipped the certification?

  • Phelinofist · 13 hours ago

    > Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment ... and cost of operation and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet)

    • sgjohnson · 9 hours ago

      > and the fact that you have radioactive material you need to securely and safely store for quite a bit (which no one has figured out yet) It's perfectly figured out. Just entomb it in concrete and store it on site. All spent nuclear fuel to date combined would quite comfortably fit in an average Walmart parking lot. It's a complete non-issue. And if we'd get really desperate, the spent fuel could be re-enriched.

  • Kon5ole · 12 hours ago

    >Nuclear has no real cons other than time/cost of deployment, 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?

    • jjk166 · 8 hours ago

      > 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. The Banqiao dam failure killed 250,000 people in a single incident. Pollution from coal plants running normally causes 1 million premature deaths per year. The deepwater horizon spill was a $100 billion disaster with an environmental impact greater than any nuclear incident. The Centralia fires in PA are still burning after over 60 years and lead to a town being abandoned. Nuclear is not uniquely risky by any rational metric.

      • Kon5ole · 1 hour ago

        >The Banqiao dam failure killed 250,000 people in a single incident. The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding. Estimates range from 26000 to 240000 people dead, but rationally one has to assume the typhoon would have caused some damage in these areas even without the dams. So claiming this was a single hydro dam causing 250 000 dead is hardly rational. If you live in a narrow valley downstream from a dam you are aware of the danger. You as an individual can take action to protect yourself. If you live upstream by even 10 feet you are in no danger at all from the dam. With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric. Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima. Also it wasn't a power plant, not even indirectly as oil is mostly used for transportation, not electricity. Chernobyl and Fukushima were power plants. So again, there is just no comparison between nuclear plants and any other power plant. Nuclear really does have a unique level of risk. Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood, and for nuclear the consequence is immense. Meaning effort has to be spent keeping the likelihood extremely small, in order for the risk to be low. This has to be accepted and considered in any discussion about nuclear power. Pretending it doesn't exist is not rational.

    • Moldoteck · 4 minutes ago

      It's cheap to operate. See https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte... The statement about getting 70% from Russia is total bullshit What non zero chance of millions of casualties? Chernobyl, a shit design that weren't allowed in the west even then is estimated to kill about 4k in total. In Fukushima the number is zero or 1 deaths from radiation due to low dose. And that's old gen2 reactor striken by tsunami and earthquake I've seen what antinuclear europe does to remove the weakness of renewables - subsidies for new gas peakers in Germany

  • jmyeet · 2 hours ago

    Oh it has tons of cons: 1. It's the most expensive form of electricity; 2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years; 3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C); 4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6; 5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades; 6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US; 7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse; 8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants; 9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers"; 10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and 11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.

    • thomashabets2 · 1 hour ago

      > No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Do fossil fuel plants pay co2 costs, or insurance costs for killing the planet? Well, it wouldn't make any sense, since it's not accidents that kill in that case, but the steady state. The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).

• Zigurd · 13 hours ago

  Nuclear power plants are uninsurable in the private market. There is no natural investor base for a product that is uninsurable. Unless you are an imagining a culture war where real capitalists are fighting corporate welfare queens, it's not a culture war issue.

• dualvariable · 13 hours ago

  > It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power. For at least the past decade, about all I've seen argued about nuclear is that it is not economical. I've been arguing that for around 15 years now.

  • jabl · 13 hours ago

    People have been arguing nuclear is too expensive and soon renewables will be so cheap they will push fossil fuels out of the grid for 30 years, if not more. Meanwhile during those 30 years, while waiting for the price of renewables to drop sufficiently, the world has built massive amounts of fossil power generation and emissions have been going up and up. 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.

    • dualvariable · 13 hours ago

      And nuclear has still sat there being too expensive and solving nothing, proving the point, but apparently this is evidence of the opposite.

      • jabl · 12 hours ago

        My argument was that while waiting for renewables to become cheap, we could have built nuclear instead of fossil capacity and avoided a shitton of emissions. The Messmer plan being an existence proof that such a thing would have been possible.

        • dualvariable · 3 hours ago

          Renewables passed nuclear a long time ago. If the economics of renewables weren't making sense, the economics of nuclear were worse.

• Moldoteck · 9 minutes ago

  It can happen like in Sweden with proper guarantees

Nature is healing.

>Rather than reviving the large reactors of the past, the government is focusing on small modular reactors, or SMRs, and other advanced technologies that supporters say could be safer, more flexible and quicker to build. >The legislation does not authorize the construction of any reactors. Instead, it creates the regulatory foundation needed before future projects can be proposed, assessed and approved. Giant step for SMRs. I'm hopefull for greater NATO collaboration regarding energy security if SMRs prove commercially viable.

• orwin · 14 hours ago

  I don't understand why people are so bullish about SMRs. 25 years ago we were trying to increase reactor size and testing breeders, no we want smaller reactors, for what reason?

  • dguest · 14 hours ago

    I always thought it was about commoditization: sure a SMR might cost 10x more per watt in theory but if you can reliably roll them off the production line without having to redesign each iteration and without the cost overrunning by 10x, it pays for itself.

    • dalyons · 14 hours ago

      A theory with a lot of leaps that is in no way guaranteed. But it’s a nice idea

    • _aavaa_ · 14 hours ago

      It will reliably cost only 10x, and it theory it will roll of a production line. The AP1000 reactors at Vogtle were explicitly marked for the modular construction as a key selling feature, which would reduce time and cost. It came out 20B over budget and 7 years late.

      • Zigurd · 14 hours ago

        It's a great story: in theory you can produce modular components of a full scale nuclear power plant in a controlled environment. In theory. In practice the production line wasn't as controlled as it needed to be and ended up delivering modules that needed significant rework. That caused modules to be delivered and ready out of order. In other words they bought a lot of project management complexity that was hidden behind the theory of modularity. SMRs are turning out to be even more expensive than conventional nuclear power plants, which are so expensive compared to renewables that even without a risk premium they are uncompetitive.

      • manquer · 13 hours ago

        Vogtle, Hinkley Point C- are all one off constructions and have very expensive regulatory compliance requirements AP1000 (reactor as Vogtle 3/4) in Taishan is estimated to cost $4M-6M /MW compared to $15M/MW+ at Vogtle. if Chinese safety standards seem lax, South Korea does regularly reactors at $4-6M/MW range. Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C (same reactor type), which infamously required some quite ineffective Fish speakers. The EPR2 series (6 reactors) in France is expected to cost considerably less than Flameville did. Key to cheap nuclear - SMR or otherwise is regular construction. SMR makes regular construction more likely as each plant is not a $10-20B+ capex that is a tough sell to tax payers particularly when it inevitably overruns, SMR also potentially have a bit less regulatory hoops to jump through due to their smaller size.

        • ViewTrick1002 · 13 hours ago

          Look at the proposed EPR2 subsidies. It is interest free loans and €100 per MWh on top of that, while assuming large learning effects. They are admitting Flamanville 3 like costs before they have even started building.

          • manquer · 13 hours ago

            Overnight costs do not get impacted by guaranteed purchase price or subsidy for it neither does it include interest rates. It is a specific aspect of the TCO. Nobody is saying nuclear is cheap it is not - we will be building a plant once in while for pure strategic reason no matter the cost anyway. The point is construction cost comes down per MW with higher frequency of plant building, and this is the case SMRs, we can get cheaper construction both Per MW and overall TCO in absolute dollar terms relative to large plants with SMRs.

        • _aavaa_ · 13 hours ago

          Are we prepared to play kingmaker and pick one SMR design to standardize on so that those can ride their theoretical learning curve (assuming we get enough buyers)? Because politically that doesn't seem likely, and I think we'll end up with the units that do get contracted to be spread across multiple firms, none of which make it out of the expensive first few units. > Even Flameville 3 in France was significantly cheaper than Hinkley point C Per wikipedia: initial cost estimate €3.3 billion, cost in 2020 (6 years before it was done) €19.1 billion, so 5.8x the budget. Supposed to enter operation in 2012, entered in 2026 "only" 14 years late. These are terrible results. That EPR2 series are "expected" to cost less says absolutely nothing. Flameville 3 was expected to cost 83% less too, and I except that if they swindle people for the money to build it we'll see it'll be just as much of an overrun. The nuclear industry seem absolutely incapable of sticking to a timeline or budget. And any one of these failures should have been disqualifying. But they get to do it over and over again.

          • manquer · 13 hours ago

            That is why even Flameville 3 was cheaper than Hinkley point C, not that it was cheap. Flameville 3 is the first reactor for France in 21st century and suffers the frequency problem I am arguing. It was a path finder therefore only one was ever ordered. EPR2 is 6 under construction and France does have a track record of doing it consistently at scale for cheap(by nuclear standards). The Asian giants all do it for cheaper because they build regularly, Japan (post Fukushima policy direction notwithstanding) and South Korea achieve overnight numbers of $5-6M/MW or less, so does China. Regular construction is key, to the industry having a chance, without SMR that is never realistic anymore.

          • teamonkey · 10 hours ago

            The most annoying thing about Hinkley Point C is that after all the delays and investments, the electricity it generates won’t even be cheap. £133/MWh! Right now we have politicians arguing that a £90/MWh strike price for offshore wind - where the construction of the wind farm is entirely encapsulated by the strike price - is expensive.

    • stephbook · 14 hours ago

      Still doesn't make sense. We could have standardized the old reactors too. Radioactive material and a bit of water.. there's no reason to design those things a hundred times. France actually did that. France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. As for floating SMBs in the harbour, I don't think climate change will be kind to this idea.

      • oofbey · 14 hours ago

        You can’t standardize manufacturing of multi billion dollar facilities. Economies of scale just don’t work that way. Even residential housing has the same problem. There’s too much variation in on-site construction.

        • MengerSponge · 14 hours ago

          You absolutely can. Read up on the French nuclear reactor fleet! https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi... There are minor variances locally, but you can make enough components common to benefit massively from economies of scale.

        • bathtub365 · 13 hours ago

          New suburb housing developments in North America typically use a handful of floorplans that are customized very slightly across many homes specifically so they don’t need hundreds of unique designs

          • AngryData · 12 hours ago

            Also the majority of changes someone might want with stud frame construction are simple and require 10 seconds of drawing to show the framer. The whole point of stud frame construction is that you can do basically whatever you want because it is overbuilt and all the connections and joints simple.

          • oofbey · 11 hours ago

            Right. So why don’t we see residential construction costs fall with this standardization? Because wright’s law / economies of scale don’t work when you are doing all the assembly on site.

        • bluGill · 13 hours ago

          Single family homes are very much standardized. You get doors in one of 6 widths (IIRC), and they are all the same height (closet doors are a different height, but otherwise standard). You get windows in a few dozen sizes. You get your wall studs in one of two lengths. And so on. There is a lot of variation of layout possible within the constraints of the standard. However the vast majority of the hard work is done in a factory to standard sizes, and the onsite work is just final assembly to easy to change specs, so there would be no advantage to a standard.

      • icantevenhold · 13 hours ago

        Floating nuclear plants next to a city sound like a recipe for disaster

      • cyberax · 13 hours ago

        > France is still shutting down its plants because the rivers are too warm in the summer. That's because French nuclear power plants are designed to be directly cooled by river water instead of using cooling towers. The biggest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde Generating Station in Arizona) is cooled by evaporating the treated wastewater, in the desert.

        • ViewTrick1002 · 13 hours ago

          All these extra methods of preserving water adds cost, to a technology where paid off plants are struggling. Let alone ruinously expensive new builds.

          • samus · 13 hours ago

            At least these installations don't need to deal with radioactive material directly, so they will have the same financial infact as similar improvements to, say, coal-fired power plants.

          • cyberax · 13 hours ago

            They don't materially affect the cost of a nuclear power plant. Cooling towers or evaporating ponds are not expensive. Coal and gas power plants also use them. You just can't easily retrofit them onto an _existing_ power plant.

            • ViewTrick1002 · 12 hours ago

              If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them. Evidently they are not free.

              • cyberax · 12 hours ago

                > If they were essentially free all plants would be built with them. Pretty much all the new thermal power plants are (including biomass-burning plants), except in places where cool water is not scarce. It's weird to glomp onto that idea, as if it's some kind of a fatal flaw of nuclear power.

      • SoftTalker · 13 hours ago

        We were still learning about flaws and failure modes of nuclear reactors. Designs kept evolving to try to address these. We never got to the passenger airliner model where we had systematically eliminated nearly every failure mode and could produce this on an assembly line.

        • MostlyStable · 3 hours ago

          They were already safer than coal...by several orders of magnitude. A Chernobyl level disaster every single year would have killed fewer people than coal power. The level of safety you are describing has literally killed millions of people. Commoditizing the existing reactors of 40-50 years ago would have lead to a dramatically better world than we currently live in, with cheaper power, essentially defeated climate change, better air quality, and fewer premature deaths associated with that air quality.

      • jabl · 12 hours ago

        > We could have standardized the old reactors too. Yes, but the potential market for GW-size reactors is fairly limited. Now, whether the market for any of these SMR reactors is large enough that any of them will be able to see any of these supposed economies of scale is a big question.

        • teamonkey · 10 hours ago

          You can in theory build a SMR next to a data centre, so I guess we’ll find out

    • oofbey · 14 hours ago

      Wright’s law is the only way to reduce costs. It’s a generalization of Moore’s law. The more of anything you build the cheaper it gets. Most products get 10% - 20% cheaper every time total production volume doubles. The most obvious example right now is rockets - launch costs are going down exponentially because we (SpaceX mostly) are doing so much of it we are finally getting economies of scale. SMRs will too, but only if they become popular. It’s a little bit of chicken and egg, but the economics are clear. If lots of people start using SMRs they WILL get cheap. And it’s a form factor where it’s plausible lots of people will.

      • Zigurd · 14 hours ago

        That's another interesting theory, but Wright's law doesn't mitigate many other disadvantages of SMRs: the need for multi site security; the need for on-site technicians at more sites; the need to build grid hook up to more locations, etc. There's a reason reactors grew to a certain size, no smaller and no bigger. Ignoring that lesson has a high price.

    • jacquesm · 14 hours ago

      There is no economic case for SMR that you couldn't make for a larger one with a massive benefit of economies of scale. SMRs are - in my opinion - a dead end, larger reactors could work well but will be delivered later and likely will still not be profitable on a KWh basis when compared to an equivalent installed base of solar and wind and will most likely be deliver much, much later.

  • 1209387 · 14 hours ago

    Because Trump is pushing SMR on all "allies", UK, Japan, Italy: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgzevzwxwro I couldn't find immediate investments from Kushner etc., but will dig further.

  • gatio · 14 hours ago

    Prefab & faster construction possibilities would be a big one.

  • cyberax · 13 hours ago

    Large reactors require unobtanium-class material engineering. Only a few companies in the _world_ can make large reactor vessels. 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.

> after voters *twice* rejected it in national referendums Democracy is just lovely. Have your citizens answer to a straightforward question on a topic twice, have them reject it, both times. And the government will still go its way. I'm not against nuclear per se, I'm just baffled at the "democratic" process.

• eru · 13 hours ago

  Shouldn't people be allowed to change their minds? A party can lose three election, and if they win the fourth, they still get into power.

• layer8 · 13 hours ago

  The referendums were in 1987 and 2011, respectively. Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change. It’s much less frequent than the usual democratic election cycle, where people are also allowed to reevaluate their positions.

  • epolanski · 13 hours ago

    > Asking once every 15+ years seems fine, the population changes and opinions change. But nobody asked, there hasn't been a third referendum.

    • jltsiren · 13 hours ago

      It doesn't work that way in Italy. A popular referendum can only abolish an existing law, partially or fully. The general public cannot vote to adopt new legislation.

• icantevenhold · 13 hours ago

  The government was elected by the people - if they disagree with this decision it will have consequences in the next election. I think the public opinion and sentiment has changed quite significantly since 2011 when the last referendum was held. The current Italian government is massively populist so they wouldn’t do this if they thought people would disagree. I don’t see any problem with the democratic process here - sure it’s a flawed system but I believe it’s still the best we came up with so far

  • epolanski · 13 hours ago

    I am not debating the benefits of democracy, rather how there's no democracy at all if a referendum is not legally binding and a government can disregard the result.

    • arlort · 2 hours ago

      The referendum is obviously legally binding, the laws they were about were abrogated as the vote requested and it's been 15 years since the last one. Since then politics shifted, technology changed, the geopolitical situation changed, 10 million people died, 9 million people became adults that weren't before If people are still against nuclear the same mechanism to call for a referendum to reject this law still exists and there's elections next year anyway.

• Alles · 1 hour ago

  Mind you the referendum vote was held only 2 years after the Chernobyl incident

I'm Italian and I'm super happy with this. The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind. Curiously enough, some Italian town signs still have a small sub-sign reading "denuclearized municipality" (example: https://live.staticflickr.com/1421/712461235_e46a2c7db5_z.jp... )

• icantevenhold · 14 hours ago

  As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy? Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?

  • someonebaggy · 13 hours ago

    It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"

    • sgjohnson · 9 hours ago

      "as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill. US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong. It has nothing to do with safety if the model that required "as low as reasonably possible" is bullshit per se. The maximum allowed annual radiation dose for US radiation workers is 50mSv/year. It's just 16x the global average background radiation. And that's the average. In reality it's more like 5x - 25x. For cancer specifically we're seeing marginally increased risk at 100 mSv/year, but it doesn't really become worrying enough until we're at 300-500 mSv/year.

  • thegabriele · 13 hours ago

    About the last question, i don't think the old plants will play any part in this eventual return.

    • icantevenhold · 13 hours ago

      Fair - but using new (unproven) technology imo only increases the cost/time/risk overall?

  • gignico · 13 hours ago

    The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.

    • icantevenhold · 13 hours ago

      Aren’t SMRs essentially unproven? I think only Russia and China built some working facilities, and the rest is still under construction. I mean anything could happen but seems like a long shot

      • gignico · 13 hours ago

        They are, but if the country has a law forbidding you from doing anything, things cannot move forward. If they'll not work, of course they won't be built. And large classic reactors are unlikely to be built either, even with this new law.

        • icantevenhold · 13 hours ago

          Gotcha - yea I think it’s a good idea to try out these things. I just hope it doesn’t become a ideological fight to make something work at any cost to fit a certain narrative (same goes for renewables of course)

      • teamonkey · 10 hours ago

        In a nutshell, yes. The argument is that small-scale nuclear reactors have been built for military and scientific applications so the tech is not especially novel. What I think is unproven is whether SMRs can be built and run safely while being cost-effective to other forms of power. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if it actually costs less to build and run one full-scale reactor than it does for multiple SMRs of the same output. That doesn’t mean they won’t have a use.

        • jasonwatkinspdx · 9 hours ago

          Yeah, the issue isn't knowing how to build small reactors, it's whether you can do so with enough economy of scale and learning to make it cheaper than conventional nuclear. And I personally have switched from bull to bear on that. I was rooting for NuScale but they're hitting the same thing as everyone else. Meanwhile, battery storage has been on an insane cost reduction curve.

          • FlowingRiver · 9 hours ago

            This is a key point to many things. Need to identify the difference between technically viable and economically viable. It is the same argument I make for Starship. Technically, yeah it should work. The economics of of going to Mars, not so sure about that.

            • jasonwatkinspdx · 8 hours ago

              If they can get Starship reliable enough, it'll definitely be successful even if it never goes to mars. But despite SpaceX's huge successes with Falcon, that doesn't prove they'll cross the finish line with Starship. Falcon and specifically the Merlin engine made just about every choice they could in favor of risk reduction rather than the best possible performance. It was a continuation of work that Tom Mueller did while at TRW. With Starship they're in more uncharted territory, especially the re-entry concept, and the engine has been designed under the opposite philosophy of trying to push limits.

  • sndcr · 13 hours ago

    It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.

    • ViewTrick1002 · 13 hours ago

      We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour. Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics: Some recent ones: Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

      • Flip-per · 12 hours ago

        I'm interested in why people think this is wrong, in case this is the reason for the downvotes.

        • K3UL · 12 hours ago

          Because what is true for these 3 countries is not true for all countries. There are counter-examples where nuclear is cheaper. In most countries which don't have the advantages of Australia or Finland, you do need a mix as the OP was saying

          • teamonkey · 10 hours ago

            What is Italy lacking? Sun? Wind?

            • Flatterer3544 · 10 hours ago

              Usually comes down to industry energy needs.

        • realusername · 9 hours ago

          I didn't downvote but it's nonsense, nobody can sustain a winter with batteries and other storage. I only checked the first paper and it doesn't seem talk about what would happen if a 3 weeks bad wind event would happen in winter, and a rough look at the figures makes me think it just wouldn't work at all. I didn't check the other papers. And the proof is in the pudding anyways, if it's that cheap and feasible to do, well let's see who's doing it.

          • FlowingRiver · 9 hours ago

            It is Simon Michaux that throws out the figure that you need 2TWH of storage to make it through he worse of Winter. https://www.ecoshock.org/2024/02/why-renewables-cannot-power... I think he points to a valid point but completely over plays his hand. Everyone that has argued these kinds of points have brought valid arguments but have completely under estimated the pace of change. Do keep in mind that Michaux is a fan of being a little contrarian. He likes the attention it being to him. He might be right, and him pointing to the issues may actually be something that helps us avoid these issues. Generally, knowing about a problem is a much better position than being slammed by something you didn't anticipate. I tend to think long term we are going to a much lower energy world, that we made the mistake of building a world and our expectations to the paradigm of fossil fuels. But I also think that we are not going back to the stone age and that renewables will do better than the pessimists. Good chance we will hit a reasonable mid-ground even if it means living standards change, possibly a smaller, slower but more intentional world. It may be nice even if it means you can no longer get a slab of Coke for an hours wage.

            • realusername · 6 hours ago

              I think the complete opposite, we are going towards a high energy world, I expect the current electric grid to be multipled by 3, both to replace petrol and add new usage on top. Which makes the whole "we'll build renewables and storage" sounds even more unrealistic

          • ViewTrick1002 · 1 hour ago

            They just model the weather hour by hour. But you’re made up scenario is of course impossible to cover.

      • chris_va · 7 hours ago

        I do a lot of work in this space, including all that modeling you mentioned. "Solved" is a bit of an overstatement. The system works, and it can work with renewables+storage (modulo total supply of BESS is not there yet). However, there is high tail risk to not having steady baseload power. And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries). Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it. My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.

        • lifty · 46 minutes ago

          I love renewables, especially solar with batteries, but I definitely see the tail risks of not having some amount of independent base load, for which nuclear seems like the best fit. The tail risk could materialize from different sources; could be an asteroid, nuclear war, weird weather patterns etc. nuclear would chug along in most of these conditions. So if I would be a policy maker or decision maker, I would definitely invest in nuclear and maintain an industry regardless of the initial cost. I would try to make it as cheap as possible.

          • ViewTrick1002 · 11 minutes ago

            This is having decided that we must waste money and resources on new nuclear, and trying to rationalize it. We fix tail risks when we encounter them. Not by envisioning your pet ones to make your solution fit.

      • rightnutwingjob · 1 hour ago

        Until one day a volcano wakes up and decides no one can have sunlight for a few months. Edit to add: heh, the CSIRO eh? That bastion of truth .

        • ViewTrick1002 · 1 hour ago

          Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues? Or the majority of the Eastern European due too hot or low rivers? Or half the Swedish fleet multiple times the last couple of years? Please do tell what is wrong with the CSIRO GenCost.

          • lifty · 43 minutes ago

            There are scenarios where either can fail, that’s why it’s smart to have a multi pronged energy strategy. Maintain strong industries for being able to do both renewables and nuclear in house so you can hedge the tail risks of either of them. Not everything needs to have the most economically efficient model. As we’ve seen with the supply chain problems they happened during Covid, some things are more important than absolute cost.

            • ViewTrick1002 · 5 minutes ago

              "Multi pronged" works when different technologies complement each other. The problem is that renewables and nucelar power competes for the same slice, a battle nuclear loses with a mile. Any grid will include emergency reserves. But those optimize for lowest possible CAPEX and higher OPEX. Since they sit idle most of the time. Nuclear power has the opposite spread of ruinously expensive CAPEX and acceptable OPEX. I would say the pandemic shows that you do not need to account for every possibility. Humanity is amazing at adapting itself and finding new solutions to the problem at hand, rather than wasting all our resources trying to prevent the next made up disaster. This is why we model with 10 year winters, X00 year floods or similar. Fix reasonable problems, leave the tail risk as tail risk. The worst that happens are rolling blackouts until the grid adapts, which is no different than any other outage due to grid maintenance or someone cutting a cable with a digger.

      • Moldoteck · 11 minutes ago

        Valcoe paper is written by the founder of antinuclear movement in Denmark(which led at ti becoming one of the highest coal burners), has wild assumptions about hydrogen getting basically free for firming Australia's weather is different from what we got in Europe. And let's not pretend many of aemos estimations are already obsolete due to increased costs of transmission and hydro storage that are huilt. Dk still has worse emissions vs france/sweden, just like SA If you don't like nuclear, you'll have gas peakers, like Germany

  • AlexandrB · 13 hours ago

    Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

    • icantevenhold · 13 hours ago

      Thanks for sharing those links, very interesting. I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays. Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh

      • K3UL · 11 hours ago

        You can also check the report from RTE (French grid operator) that models several scenarios and mentions this security of supply thing https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/publications/ene...

  • cloudie78 · 12 hours ago

    Two words: base load And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)

    • yifanl · 12 hours ago

      Can you use more than 2 words in your explanation next time? Reciting known talking points offers little.

    • fnwbr · 12 hours ago

      lol because nuclear reactors are so damn stable: https://www.euronews.com/2026/07/13/france-shuts-down-nuclea...

    • bryanlarsen · 12 hours ago

      The fact that nuclear is good at the easy part of power production is not a point in favor of nuclear. Grids are built to peak needs; any grid that can handle peak load can handle base load.

    • Rebelgecko · 12 hours ago

      Is there something unique to Italy that makes it an intractable problem? Where I live we've been able to shift a huge amount of our fossil fuels over to batteries in a relatively short time. It's nice that nuclear has power production 24/7 but it seems unnecessary when there's already a glut during the daytime

    • dalyons · 10 hours ago

      Six words: base load generation is economically obsolete

    • goodpoint · 8 minutes ago

      base load is a myth

  • cpill · 12 hours ago

    can you link to data to prove the economics are bad?

  • mahboi · 7 hours ago

    If it's actually inefficient, there's no need to have laws against it.

    • icantevenhold · 7 hours ago

      I don’t follow that logic. Because there was a law against its efficient?

  • r3trohack3r · 2 hours ago

    I wonder why China has brought 27 nuclear reactors online in the past 10 years, with another 36 actively being developed.

  • rightnutwingjob · 2 hours ago

    It doesn’t matter what you think . What does the data tell us? Won’t it also take decades and cost billions to roll out renewables to the extend that they can even put a dent in total energy usage? So I don’t see how that is even an argument.

  • Moldoteck · 14 minutes ago

    Because both are needed if you don't like gas. Fossils take even more billions so it's ok

• lnxg33k1 · 12 hours ago

  we had a referendum in 2011

  • vconnor · 10 hours ago

    Right after Fukushima

    • mahboi · 7 hours ago

      Wow

• fweimer · 11 hours ago

  Where in Italy would you put reactors? https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-i... Sardinia?

  • someonebaggy · 11 hours ago

    Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.

  • scythe · 9 hours ago

    I think that there are plenty of blue areas on that map

  • wraptile · 3 hours ago

    wow, seems like Italy and Turkey are few places where you _would not_ want to go back to nuclear. Wild. I guess the old geezers approving this wouldn't even live to see the first meltdown anyway.

  • etiennebausson · 2 hours ago

    That doesn't look good, and that's before you filter by proximity to a large river (that doesn't run dry in summer). I would say near Pisa, on the Arno River.

  • vconnor · 1 hour ago

    Scroll up. There was one in Trino, Piedmont, which I imagine will be among the first sites to be considered. Judging from the map, Piedmont, Liguria, Trentino, Tuscany and Basilicata have good sites.

  • rich_sasha · 5 minutes ago

    For a point of comparison, I understand the Fukushima plant survived the mag 9 earthquake just fine - but got damaged by the ensuing tsunami. Specifically, the water flooded the diesel generators for emergency cooling - and it went downhill from there. Is the Italian coastline at high risk of tsunamis as well?

• lawgimenez · 10 hours ago

  In my country, we also have a dormant nuclear plant because of Chernobyl and political reasons. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/world/asia/philippines-ba...

I've seen quite a few SMR proposals over the last couple of years and not a single one that dared to address the whole cycle from deployment to eventual decommission as a function of the total revenues - costs to operate. Most of these projects seem to be made to bilk investors or governments rather than to actually produce power. The day Italy produces the first KWh that is net profitable to the operators without counting subsidies I will be highly amazed, and that's assuming they get to operational in the first place.

• asmodeuslucifer · 13 hours ago

  I agree, I tell everyone who will listen that no country, not Russia, China, Japan, France, USA etc has ever made nuclear power profitable. And you can't blame it on the environmentalists in China and Russia. That being said, many countries consider it a national security issue not to be held hostage to foreign oil.

  • EA-3167 · 13 hours ago

    China, Russia and the USA all have massive and vested interests in fossil fuels. In the US for example we’ve been subsidizing the everloving hell out of fossil, eroding regulations that would hold them accountable for externalities… …and then people wonder why nuclear isn’t competitive. When you hold one thing under a microscope because “radiation” scares people, we end up with millions dead per year from air and water pollution due to fossil fuels.

    • lukan · 13 hours ago

      People who know how much effort it takes to constantly measure and contain radioactivity and what a mess it is to mine for Uranium in the first place also don't wonder. If not, reading a list of this helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and... But sure, oil leaks can be bad as well. Solar leaks on the other hand seem bearable.

      • EA-3167 · 13 hours ago

        I am someone who knows, hence my disgust. Time to learn about the radioactivity of coal fly ash and how carefully that’s managed.

        • lukan · 12 hours ago

          Oh, I know and am in favor of shutting coal down asap and before nuclear. But you seem to imply handling radioactivity is not a big problem compared to fossils, but I believe it is, considering how faulty and corrupt individual humans are, or corporations or government bodies doing the oversight.

      • batisteo · 12 hours ago

        I believe burning coal realease far more Uranium and radioactive material than nuclear ever did. Listing the plane crashes over the last century wont buldge the statistics of the safety of this mean of transportation.

        • lukan · 12 hours ago

          Did I imply anywhere anyhow that I am a fan of coal? I just don't think it is a good idea to replace something dirty with something else dirty that is indeed quite safe if all goes well, but is horrible if something goes wrong. Italy has lot's of sun and wind (and geothermal potential).

          • EA-3167 · 10 hours ago

            Everything is a comparison to what exists, not your dreams. The alternative to coal today isn't just renewables, and thinking in those absolute terms is in large part what's handed the fossil fuel lobby decades of default victories. We don't have time for perfect solution, do all of what you said AND THEN ALSO MORE.

            • lukan · 9 hours ago

              "We don't have time for perfect solution" Exactly. You can buy and deploy solar, wind and batteries as much as you want now. If you care about strategic independence, build factories for them. But a nuclear reactor takes a long time to get build. And is likely way more expensive. If italy manages to do it fast and cheap - other countries will follow, but I believe it when I see it.

    • otherme123 · 13 hours ago

      China also? How is that? China is a big importer of oil, and is heavily burning coal (more than 50% their energy mix), that is also partly imported. They are fighting for a cleaner energy not because they are green but because they don't want to be dependent on imports, and some people even accuse them of undercutting solar panel pricing to get all the world market. They are installing nuclear power like no other country (1 GW yearly since 2014), and Wikipedia says that 50% of all nuclear capacity being built is in China ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country ): 37 new reactors, followed by India with 6 and Russia , Egypt and Korea with 4. USA and France, which are both pro-nuclear or nuclear neutral, are building 0 reactors. But yeah, China has interests against nuclear power. You are not helping your case by spreading misinformation and calling other people misinformed by making a strawman ("radiation scares people"). I am against nuclear (or rather not pro-nuclear) because it is not economically sound, because it is massively subsidized by Governments for the private sector to profit.

      • hnedeotes · 13 hours ago

        If china that is the number one producer of solar panels and batteries is investing in nuclear perhaps that shows that indeed it's not such a bad bet? Specially taking into account the military applications of such capabilities. It would also seem that investing into it may perhaps render significant gains into the future as R&D becomes more involved with actual running systems and funded (skin in the game?) It seems the only ones who lost by abandoning their nuclear programs were European countries (specially Germany) in detriment of Russia and other Oil trading countries... It's even probable that much of the "bad press" nuclear has had for the past decades was in fact instigated by oil-producing countries doesn't it?

      • bryanlarsen · 13 hours ago

        Coal's share of electricity production in China fell below 50% in 2026 for the first time ever. This is despite idling nat gas plants due to the war in Iran messing up shipments. Nuclear's share of electricity in China is below 4% and dropping. They do not use a significant amount of nuclear. That this insignificant amount of nuclear is more than any other country is quite telling.

        • EA-3167 · 7 hours ago

          Quite telling, but then so is climate change and it's not exactly hard to understand the motives of those who want(ed) to deny it for power and profit. We should be listening to their wise advice on this topic... why?

    • nradov · 13 hours ago

      China has some coal reserves but overall they're a major net fossil fuel importer. They're quite short of crude oil and natural gas reserves relative to demand. This is a serious national security risk which is why they've been rapidly electrifying their economy and building solar, nuclear, and hydro power plants (along with coal fired power plants).

      • EA-3167 · 13 hours ago

        They’ve been building out every form of power generation they can. Nuclear, solar, wind and fossil. It’s all skyrocketing. The talking point that they’re going green doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. https://www.globalelectricity.org/china-electricity-producti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

        • nradov · 13 hours ago

          I never claimed that China is "going green" (whatever that means), merely that they're gradually reducing their dependence on imported fossil fuels.

        • bryanlarsen · 12 hours ago

          That link is out of date. China's coal share fell under 50% this year (your link says 58%), and their CO2 emissions dropped 1% the first half of 2026. So yes, it can be reasonably claimed that China is greening. "greening", not "green" -- 49.7% coal is still a lot of CO2. https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/china-pushes-coal-...

          • ericmay · 12 hours ago

            Maybe emissions fell because industrial activity fell instead? Maybe oil and gas have been used less because the cost has risen. Maybe that explains coal as well depending on how it is used. I’m speculating coal might be used in the production of steel - what if that product is highly tariffed in the US and EU so China had to cut back? China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal. If it was they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet.

            • EA-3167 · 11 hours ago

              Oh you're correct, the same thing is happening in India without any of the nonsense fanfare. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi... https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/span-... You can see the same dips hit at the same time for the same reason. In terms of Chinese coal though there's a reason boosters always talk about percentages and not absolute number... one goes down, but the other keeps rising. Even if China continues on the current course in terms of tonnage burned they won't reach "peak coal" until at least 2030.

            • triceratops · 10 hours ago

              > China is “greening” but we should be skeptical that it’s out of some lofty moral goal Why does the "why" matter? Tons of carbon are tons of carbon, right? That's what people say when you tell them about per-capita emissions. > they wouldn’t be hoarding the production of rare earth minerals and would be freely giving away technology for the sake of the planet. You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled. What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment.

              • ericmay · 9 hours ago

                > Why does the "why" matter? Well it doesn’t entirely matter but we should just acknowledge that it’s a geopolitical strategy and not really something they are doing for the planet. > You can freely buy as many cheap panels and batteries and EVs and heat pumps from China as you like (unless your country is stupid enough to tariff or ban them). Those come with minerals. When they reach end-of-life they can be recycled. What exactly are they "hoarding" that the planet needs to go green? It hasn't prevented Pakistan or Vietnam from going ham on PV deployment. Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports for example due to alleged “dual use” as they continue to apply military pressure on democratic Taiwan? I’d encourage you to read up on these restrictions with respect to Japan for example who is alarmed by Chinese and North Korean provocations. You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels. For some these tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies. It’s not just the US, by the way. The EU is tariffing China too. They are entitled to pursue these strategies but we are also entitled in the west to recognize them and combat them how we see fit.

                • triceratops · 7 hours ago

                  > not really something they are doing for the planet If it doesn't matter why do you feel the need to acknowledge it? > Are you unfamiliar with China’s restrictions on rare earth exports [to Japan] for example due to alleged “dual use” How do these restrictions prevent Japan from using Chinese PV and batteries in their grid? > You can buy so many cheap panels practically only from China because they subsidized the industry Translation: they gave the world a ton of deeply discounted goods. And you said they didn't do anything nice for anyone! > so other countries couldn’t compete and build their own solar panels Other countries are free to subsidize their own solar and battery industries. Godspeed to the ones doing it right now. But also is it really that amazing an industry to have? Low-margins, constant price wars, undifferentiated commodity product without much of a moat. Rich economies tend not to have those industries anyway. > For some these tariffs and bans are responses to these anti-competitive strategies Surely then the US must be approving solar projects at record pace then? And wind too? > The EU is tariffing China too. There are no EU tariffs on Chinese solar panels or grid-scale batteries or heat pumps. They are considering tariffing heat pumps right now.