This still has to pass with the people in a referendum.

The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic.

Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change.

We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time.

• bilekas

  today at 5:13 PM

  Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.

  • TheCondor

    today at 6:47 PM

    Did waste management become a solved problem?

    In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.

  • thomasmg

    today at 6:45 PM

    Solar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.

    • sharpneli

      today at 6:48 PM

      Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that.

      There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter.

      What should one do then? Just shut everything down?

  • jltsiren

    today at 5:38 PM

    Political will is not the actual bottleneck.

    Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company chosen to build it first proved to be incompetent and later also politically undesirable. As for the third reactor, the company that got the permit determined that it makes more sense to invest the money in something else.

    • UltraSane

      today at 5:39 PM

      China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.

      • jltsiren

        today at 5:54 PM

        One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies.

        China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.

        • lenerdenator

          today at 6:47 PM

          > China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.

          Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.

      • ponector

        today at 6:02 PM

        There is no such thing as cheap nuclear reactor. Even cheaper Chernobyl type is expensive to build.

      • triceratops

        today at 6:42 PM

        How much per kW?

      • pydry

        today at 5:44 PM

        China and South Korea build everything more cheaply because they have a better developed industrial base.

        Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.

        • UltraSane

          today at 5:53 PM

          solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.

          • spikels

            today at 6:20 PM

            The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.

          • pydry

            today at 6:11 PM

            This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.

            The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.

            Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

            In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.

            • coryrc

              today at 6:45 PM

              In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...

              In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.

              You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.

  • Gud

    today at 5:17 PM

    Switzerland is not in the EU.

    • bilekas

      today at 5:37 PM

      It's not and that's fine, but it's very much part of the European economic area, and we have a great relationship as well as a lot of alignments with standards and so on. The EU wouldn't have no issues taking notes from the Swiss.

      • ahtihn

        today at 5:54 PM

        Switzerland is not part of the European economic area, aka EEA.

    • lopis

      today at 5:30 PM

      While it's not part of the EU as a member, Switzerland is quite literally in the EU.

      • yulker

        today at 5:44 PM

        Just the opposite. It's literally not in the EU. It's literally in Europe but not in the EU.

        • jrflowers

          today at 6:10 PM

          I like that you ignore that “in” means “inside” in one sentence and then use that exact meaning of the word in the following sentence

        • BurningFrog

          today at 6:06 PM

          OP was making a geometric observation.

          • amanaplanacanal

            today at 6:45 PM

            By that light, the UK is still in the EU. I bet they would disagree though.

  • esarbe

    today at 5:19 PM

    It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1].

    At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive.

    https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...

    • rayiner

      today at 5:28 PM

      It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies.

      If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the economy, like home heating. We’d have extremely mature technology to give to developing countries that need massive baseload for industrial production. Today, we’d be discussing how many older nukes we could retire and replace with wind and solar plants.

      • triceratops

        today at 6:43 PM

        > It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death

        How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?

        • coryrc

          today at 6:48 PM

          Because they were useful idiots funded by fossil fuel companies.

          (also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)

      • LinXitoW

        today at 6:01 PM

        So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive. I'm certain there's ZERO correlation between regulations that make it expensive and regulations making it safe....................

        So, where is the free market shitting out nuclear power? Anywhere?

        • ethbr1

          today at 6:32 PM

          > So its really safe, but also the evil regulations make it expensive

          Yes, with extra steps.

          Regulations, more so than their impact on price, cost calendar time.

          Time, especially for already-lengthy and complicated infrastructure projects, costs volume.

          And low volume means high prices and a slow pace of improvement.

          Henry Ford wouldn't have built many automobiles, or improved them as quickly as he did, if every one needed to be individually permitted by multiple government agencies.

          The failure of nuclear is that it never standardized and scaled to industrially-efficient volumes (outside of arguably France) at exactly the point that it could have technologically done so (~1970s). Had Offshore Power Systems^ begun producing floating reactors at volume in Jacksonville, FL in the late 70s, we'd be having a very different conversation about cheap American nuclear power today.

          ^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems

        • jrflowers

          today at 6:17 PM

          > The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has over 7,500 reactor years of cumulative reactor operation, and nuclear powered ships have steamed over 175 million miles. Since the inception of the program, there has never been an accident involving a naval reactor nor a release of radioactivity to the environment which has adversely affected public health or safety.

          https://www.nr-ha.org/history

      • adjejmxbdjdn

        today at 5:48 PM

        Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades.

        Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal.

        But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.

        • rayiner

          today at 6:09 PM

          > Nuclear has never been financially viable

          We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.

      • esarbe

        today at 5:50 PM

        Ah, yes - "the evil environmentalists." Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.

        We stopped building nuclear reactors in the early 1970ies[0], long before there was any large organized civil movement organizing against it - because with the required additional complexity to make them safe, the technology was just too expensive.

        (As always - it's the capitalists that messed things up, not civil society.)

        Despite having 70 years of progress, nuclear today is more expensive than ever. It just doesn't scale.

        France's nuclear operator EDF is €50 billion in debt. They make about €3 billion per year - and have between €150 - €200 billion investments on the table for the next 10 years. Go figure.

        [0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...

        • uxp100

          today at 6:21 PM

          I mostly agree with your larger point, but the anti-nuclear movement predates the 70s by quite a bit.

        • TimorousBestie

          today at 6:02 PM

          > Congratulations, you really torched that straw man.

          Who are we to begrudge a man his decade-long windmills-tilting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

      • pydry

        today at 5:47 PM

        >environmentalists have choked it to death.

        Those regulations you despise were written in blood.

        Moreover, Nuclear power enjoys free catastrophe insurance. If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.

        So yeah, all you have to do is let them keep their freebie insurance, lavish them with subsidies and water down the regulations which make it vastly more likely that they'll need to use it.

        Or just build some solar, some wind and some storage, save a mountain of cash and have new generation projects take under five years to finish instead of more than 20.

        • TimorousBestie

          today at 5:56 PM

          > If a Fukushima style meltdown happens, the taxpayer is always on the hook for 95%+ of the cleanup costs.

          An apt reference. In both India and China it was the Fukushima disaster that spurred protests and stalled nuclear power growth. Organized environmental activism in both countries is basically nonexistent.

          I would rank US-led nonproliferation policies above environmental activism as a cause for slow nuclear adoption as well. (Nonproliferation was primarily a military objective, by the way, not an environmentalist one.) Many countries only have nuclear power programs because France decided to occasionally proliferate them, many times over US objections.

          • pydry

            today at 6:03 PM

            The effect environmentalists have on adoption is a rounding error compared to the humongous cost of nuclear power.

            Most non nuclear powers have a few for the same reason Iran does: having some nuclear scientists and a developed nuclear industry around is handy in case of a, uh, geopolitical "emergency". This is why Poland suddenly became interested in 2023 specifically.

            Most countries do not want a lot though - it's too expensive.

            • TimorousBestie

              today at 6:08 PM

              I agree, I also believe the overall startup cost and low ROI is more relevant than the occasional tree-hugger’s limited political influence.

    • Gud

      today at 5:26 PM

      Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap?

      They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.

      • adjejmxbdjdn

        today at 5:53 PM

        1. Nuclear has a negative learning curve. It’s gotten more expensive with time. Part of the reason is increasing geopolitical risks (the U.S. just launched a war on Iran because of the possibility it may upgrade nuclear material to weapon capabilities), lost knowledge and expertise, and also the increasing relative cost of financing in the cost of energy projects.

        2. Nuclear was built at a time when governments were much more likely to directly invest in energy projects. It didn’t have to compete with Labubus for private dollars.

        3. Its current competition didn’t exist, given how much cheaper solar and wind have gotten, and how much cheaper battery tech has gotten with signs all of them will only get even cheaper. And on the non renewable side, natural gas has become incredibly cheaper as well.

        • Gud

          today at 5:58 PM

          1. I personally believe the “lost knowledge “ is overstated. Europe knows very well how to manage large scale infrastructure projects. It still has a healthy nuclear industry.

          2. Once the vote is there(Switzerland is a direct democracy), the public funds will be there. Sweden has recently chosen to invest ~40B Euro.

          3. Solar, really? In Switzerland? Many parts of the industrialised world receive very little sun, especially in winter, where coincidentally, energy usage peaks.

          And intermittent power generation like wind is no competition to nuclear.

          These are very weak arguments. Good luck replacing Oskarshamn with solar panels…

      • tialaramex

        today at 6:09 PM

        What counts as "fast and cheap" ?

        For the renewables "Fast and cheap" turns out to mean you get the paperwork in the winter and you build a solar farm that summer, it's not quite sowing wheat - teams of competent people building the farm isn't the same thing as just chucking the seeds into the dirt with a machine, but the timeframe isn't so different.

        Sweden's nuclear plants seem to have taken maybe 6+ years from breaking ground (not paperwork) to first power, so if you begin today you might have a plant in 2032 at the earliest. I can't see any prices, not even a CfD strike price for Sweden's new proposed plants.

        The UK agreed £92.50 strike price (2012 prices) for the new nukes it may never actually receive, but unlike Sweden the UK has never pledged to relinquish nuclear weapons so to some extent having a native "nuclear" capability is relevant to national security.

      • tokioyoyo

        today at 5:36 PM

        Process works if you keep building, expanding and making it safer. If you don’t build it for decades, you’re basically starting from scratch.

        It is a hard sell when you have to front a good chunk of money, without a track record of successful build ups. It applies to other infrastructure stuff like HSR.

        • Gud

          today at 5:47 PM

          So let’s learn from that lesson and rebuild nuclear power in Europe?

          Let’s hope Switzerland takes the lead here, Sweden are already building.

          The political will is there. Let’s do it?

    • UltraSane

      today at 5:40 PM

      Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.

      • esarbe

        today at 6:12 PM

        No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.

        We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive.

        It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition".

        [0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...

    • wat10000

      today at 5:55 PM

      Your link says increased modulation adds 1.5-3.75 million euros/year in maintenance costs. That's utterly insignificant for the electricity supply to a nation of 70 million.

• wil421

  today at 6:11 PM

  What kind of environmental impact does hydro have in Switzerland? I’d expect it’s less because they are in the mountains.

  I’m against a lot of Hydro power in the US because the environmental damage is high. Plus I like to fish and they have huge impacts on the ecosystems. But these are relatively flat places compared to Switzerland.

  • today at 6:42 PM

• sajithdilshan

  today at 6:09 PM

  I really hope Swiss people learned a lesson from Germany and vote to build nuclear power plant. We need more investment in research on how to build safe, efficient power plants and ways of re-using spent nuclear fuel

• orwin

  today at 3:59 PM

  I didn't think about seasonality of hydro power. You might want french design then, they are the most effective as starting/shutting down.

• softfalcon

  today at 4:53 PM

  I agree with you that you can't rely on hydro alone to power your country. It also seems like you're trying to be reasonable and suggest that any new nuclear production in your country needs to be done as ethically and environmentally friendly as possible.

  Your statement about "We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time" really stood out to me.

  Are Swiss folks maybe acting a bit NIMBY by not allowing nuclear in their own country, but are fine with buying French nuclear power? It seems a tad hypocritical to be against nuclear, while simultaneously using it as long as it's "not in my country".

• supertroop

  today at 6:00 PM

  I wouldn’t pin the irrational discourse on the left. Pro nuclear people are just as k=1 thinkers as well. We just need long term policy not short term panic.

• jules

  today at 5:25 PM

  If there is any country that can safely build nuclear power plants, it is Switzerland.

  • chinathrow

    today at 6:16 PM

    Unless you drill holes into the outer containment hull.

• alephnerd

  today at 3:58 PM

  > The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland

  Does discourse from neighboring countries leak in as well? For example, German and Italian media's anti-nuclear sentiment versus French media's neutral to vaguely positive sentiment about nuclear.

  • jokteur

    today at 4:02 PM

    French part of Switzerland is much more left leaning, so I can expect more anti-nuclear sentiment on this side. But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.

    But, Germany's decision after Fukushima to close down all nuclear reactors has had a strong impact on the 2017 votation that banned nuclear in Switzerland. So I guess the influence is there.

    • ahtihn

      today at 6:01 PM

      > But the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for, I don't think the language itself has an impact.

      People aren't really partisan like that in Switzerland. They'll happily elect people from one party then vote against the party on specific issues in referendums or initiatives.

      For something like nuclear, people who vote for green party might be mostly aligned with the party because it's a key issue for them while people who vote for center or right parties won't really care what the party recommends.

    • tonfa

      today at 4:19 PM

      I'd see a lot more "nuclear no thanks" stickers in swiss German side than Romandie.

      I'd expect the strong anti movement from Germany to have some impact.

    • folkrav

      today at 5:05 PM

      > the sentiment of nuclear depends purely on which party you vote for

      Unless you personally agree with whatever your preferred party's line is on everything and generalize that sentiment, I'm not sure how to get to that conclusion.

      • seviu

        today at 5:10 PM

        I am member of the SP in Switzerland and I am pro nuclear.

        I don’t know why we put people in political buckets. It’s good to disagree. I am probably the weird guy but so be it.

    • alephnerd

      today at 4:05 PM

      So French Swiss or German Swiss aren't going to be consuming French or German news media? If so that's refreshing compared to Canadians and Brits who constantly try to butt into American media and culture wars (eg. Rebel News, UnHerd) and vice versa (eg. X)

      • shermantanktop

        today at 4:23 PM

        Switzerland's multilingual situation might look primed for a balkanized culture war, especially if you are coming from a place where that is common. But 1) it's a country of 10m people and 2) the national identity is centered around being unified despite language differences.

        Of course people make jokes and remarks about "those people" who speak a different language. But "those people" are probably 1h away by train, are probably coworkers, and their language was taught in your school (even if some didn't bother to learn).

      • jokteur

        today at 4:11 PM

        We have national media (German: srf, French/Italian: rts, Romanche: rtr), people consume that, and a few medias that have multiple language versions like 20minutes.

        We also have a few language specific medias (German: NZZ, Tagesanzeiger, Blick, ..., French: Le Temps, 24 heures, La Liberté, ...), but I think most people consume Swiss media, especially when Swiss politics and local afairs are absolutely not covered by French and German medias.

        • Arodex

          today at 4:24 PM

          The funny thing is that people know more about what is happening in the neighbouring countries than in the other parts of Switzerland. The "national" media is very divided and only covers French-speaking regions in French, German-speaking in German, etc. as if they were local media.

          • mytailorisrich

            today at 5:49 PM

            Switzerland is like that. I remember asking (in my best German) the person manning a ticket counter at Zurich train station if they spoke French once, if a look could kill I'd be dead, lol.

            It gives the strange feeling that although they decided to create a country together they don't want to interact with each others unless absolutely necessary.

      • redsocksfan45

        today at 4:17 PM

        [dead]

• christkv

  today at 4:03 PM

  You could build the reactors inside the mountains to improve the security and effects of things like meltdowns.

  • jokteur

    today at 4:06 PM

    Funny thing you mention that.

    We had a nuclear meltdown in an experimental reactor in Lucens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor).

  • IsTom

    today at 4:10 PM

    It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.

• UltraSane

  today at 5:38 PM

  "All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear"

  This is like firefighters opposing using water.

Nuclear energy is really the energy of the future, fission still has bright days ahead of it. the startup market for SMRs is going to boom once the core challenges will have been solved, sure that we will see many ETH founders go into that world

• esarbe

  today at 5:26 PM

  There's no measure by which nuclear energy is the "energy of the future". It's too complex, too expensive and it doesn't scale. SMRs are proving to be a fever dream with ever rising costs and the number of nuclear reactors in operation is decreasing year by year and both Wind and PV are now each producing more electricity than nuclear.

  Nuclear has had its moment. That moment is gone.

  • UltraSane

    today at 5:58 PM

    PWRs are not really that complicated. They are just very hot metal rods inside a thick steel pressure vessel that boil water to make steam.

    "Nuclear has had its moment. That moment is gone."

    When CO2 caused climate changed is posed to be civilization altering this is a very very foolish thing to say.

• Arodex

  today at 3:56 PM

  Every SMR startup is failing. The more they progress, the more they revise their costs upwards.

  SMR make as much sense as space datacenters. You can gaslight investors, you can gaslight HN, you can gaslight a national parliament full of lobbyists, but you can't gaslight thermodynamics.

  • mpweiher

    today at 4:18 PM

    > Every SMR startup is failing.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586648

    • Arodex

      today at 4:37 PM

      Have you read the comments?

  • john_strinlai

    today at 4:04 PM

    >SMR make as much sense as space datacenters.

    you are in this thread a lot, so i am guessing you must be very familiar with the industry. maybe you can help me understand:

    is the wikipedia on SMRs incorrect/lying when they say that there are commercially operating SMRs since 2020?

    and how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?

    • Arodex

      today at 4:14 PM

      >commercially operating

      And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money.

      >how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?

      Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.

      Or solar.

      And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?

      Nuclear attracts clever people, but it isn't smart nor wise.

      • vablings

        today at 4:29 PM

        I think you have a misunderstanding of what a SMR is supposed to be.

        Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to deploy and cost will be significantly reduced.

        We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs and have been for a very long time. Off the top of my head ship power has been exported to local areas for disaster relief

        Solar is absolutely fantastic and your average person should not be hawking at solar for your home to offset your power bill. The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.

        I don't think the likes of Westinghouse, Siemens, Rolls Royce and GE are duped. They are trying to solve a very hard problem!

        • Arodex

          today at 4:40 PM

          >The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.

          Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have?

          For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop?

          • slibhb

            today at 6:42 PM

            This is such a silly argument. Battery and solar technologies are progressing regardless of people building nuclear. It's simply not the case that we can stop investing in nuclear and use that money to accelerate battery/solar.

            The best energy strategies are all-of-the-above.

          • p2detar

            today at 6:46 PM

            [delayed]

      • john_strinlai

        today at 4:36 PM

        >Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics.

        true, you said "gaslight thermodynamics", which i have no idea what that means, so i took a guess at what you were implying.

        >never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.

        is efficiency really the only metric to be considered? i feel like available space, availability of alternatives, time to complete construction, etc. are worthwhile to consider.

        >And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?

        considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments worldwide considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania. but i am not an expert. you are talking like you are one, which is why i am asking questions.

        • Arodex

          today at 4:44 PM

          >i feel like available space, time to complete construction

          All of these favor again bigger reactors.

          >considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania.

          All of the Swiss energy companies are asking to be bailed out in advance of the investment in nuclear.

          • Jolter

            today at 6:27 PM

            Sweden recently did the same: in order for companies to agree to make new reactors, the government had to promise them a price floor for the electricity they produce. The price floor suggested is more than twice the current price on the spot market. That means that, for the lifetime of those reactors, Swedish taxpayers will be subsidizing production of nuclear power. I thought the idea was that they would be profitable? What happened to the political right’s love of the free market? When politicians go fixing prices with this kind of ”advance bailout”, it just makes it look like they are trying to get a nice retirement job in the nuclear power sector…

          • john_strinlai

            today at 4:45 PM

            >All of these favor again bigger reactors.

            how does having less available space favor a bigger reactor?

            and how is constructing a bigger reactor faster than constructing a smaller one?

            • bryanlarsen

              today at 5:04 PM

              There are two ways of achieving economies of scale: making things bigger or making more of them.

              For small quantities, the former is usually more effective -- making things bigger lets you make fewer of them, reducing costs.

              For large quantities, a factory can enable insane economies of scale.

              SMR proponents are talking about building dozens of reactors. That fits very firmly in the "small quantity" column where economies of scale almost always favor building things bigger.

            • cauch

              today at 4:57 PM

              Just a guess (I'm not the previous user), but I guess you need to look at the space _per GWh_?

              If a big nuclear reactor takes 10x more space but has 20x more capacity, then it means not having much space favors the big nuclear reactor rather than building 10 small ones that will take twice more space.

              (and same for the time)

              • john_strinlai

                today at 5:00 PM

                its probably my fault for not making myself clear. i mean when the available space is constrained to a specific amount of space that cannot be exceeded.

                just picking random numbers:

                i have 1 square mile available. a big reactor takes 4 square miles. i cannot fit a big reactor, despite the bigger reactor being more efficient.

            • Arodex

              today at 5:00 PM

              If you need 500 MW, you build one 500 MW reactor, not five 100 MW reactors. They will take more space.

              As for speed, a 100 MW reactor is not commissioned in 1/5 of the time a 500 MW reactor is.

              • Jolter

                today at 6:29 PM

                I think the promise of SMR is that the 1/5th reactor can be built in 1/2 the time. And you build five of them in parallell. And you have your power sources gradually online over about the same time as one ”big bang” build would take.

                I don’t think it’s going to work out that way, but that’s how it’s being sold.

      • jkman

        today at 4:19 PM

        >'taylor-made' Says it all, doesn't it

  • bakies

    today at 4:07 PM

    What are the challenges they face?

    • Manuel_D

      today at 5:14 PM

      One is regulatory. At least in the US, every nuclear reactor that produces at least 100 MW needs to carry a 375 million dollar insurance policy at minimum. Under 100 MW there is an alternate schedule that ranges from 5 million to 75 million scaling based on output. But the net result is that it's still more profitable to built a single large reactor, since a 1 GW reactor is less to insure than 10 100 MW reactors. This is written into law, it would require Congress to change it.

      Second is that nuclear reactor efficiency tends to improve with size. The ratio of thermal watts to electric watts tends to be better with large reactors. I'm not super well versed on the engineering tradeoffs here by my rough understanding is that waste heat scales with surface area while useful energy extraction scales with volume.

    • redsocksfan45

      today at 4:21 PM

      [dead]

  • 2muchcoffeeman

    today at 4:02 PM

    Doesn’t China have SMRs?

    • hangonhn

      today at 6:08 PM

      Just one so far and it's not particularly small compared to a more conventional reactor.

      Russia actually does have a smallish SMR but it wasn't terribly cheap to build nor operate. IIRC it is in the form of a ship and used to power a city somewhere in the north.

      SMR has a place for sure but no one has demonstrated the unit costs savings of making a lot of them yet.

      You can actually get some, if not most, of the economy of scale by doing a fleet build of one specific design. The US seems to be working on that and picked the Westinghouse AP-1000. I think that initiative has a decent chance of succeeding. The first few will be slow and expensive to build (even China has had delays with their nuclear roll out) but the subsequent ones will get cheaper and faster to build. This is how some countries did it during the first nuclear power expansion era.

  • RealityVoid

    today at 4:02 PM

    How are SMR's "gaslighting themodynamics"? I mean, sure, I can accept that they're not economical with current tech, but it's not a frigging' perpetuum mobile, it's feasible technology.

    • Arodex

      today at 4:09 PM

      Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical. A bigger nuclear reactor will always undercut your price per watt.

      • Manuel_D

        today at 5:22 PM

        The value propositions of SMRs are logistics and re-use of existing infrastructure. The idea is that you could have easily transportable reactors that you can plop down in an existing coal plant, and then reuse the turbine, dynamo, etc. that are already in place.

        The fact that we haven't seen more widespread use of SMRs suggests that you're right. But it's important to point out that there are cost saving opportunities that could potentially reduce the net price per watt despite worse thermodynamic efficiency.

      • chickenbig

        today at 4:53 PM

        > Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical.

        And the link between thermodynamics and the price of electricity is what?

        • Arodex

          today at 5:07 PM

          Your small nuclear reactor is going to need almost as much engineering , plumbing, safety mechanism, personnel, maintenance, etc... as your big nuclear reactor.

          • 0-_-0

            today at 6:27 PM

            Not if it's mass produced

      • holoduke

        today at 4:34 PM

        The mindset that makes people stuck in time. Sorry but SMRs are potentially very cheap. Not at this point. ,but when operated on scale they will be. You need to start

  • lightedman

    today at 4:38 PM

    "SMR make as much sense as space datacenters."

    So a whole lot of sense given the entire US Navy uses them and I already have one datacenter operating up in space (small test unit that over 3 months has provided ZERO issues) and a bigger one heading up into orbit next year when it's done being made.

    "but you can't gaslight thermodynamics"

    No but you can certainly conflate them like you're doing right now.

    • Manuel_D

      today at 5:27 PM

      The Navy uses highly enriched uranium for its reactors, something like 70-80% enrichment. This is a non starter for civilian use, on account of proliferation concerns. That, and the enrichment requirements drive up fuel costs.

    • Arodex

      today at 5:10 PM

      >the entire US Navy uses them

      Is the business of the US Navy to sell electrity on the market?

      You are the one conflating things that have absolutely no connections.

    • RealityVoid

      today at 4:56 PM

      Ok, this is interesting. I am skeptic about DC's in space, but I do appreciate people actually doing stuff. What is it computing up there. How did you get it up? How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary.

This is going to be a huge waste of time and money until we realize that building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then. Instead we could also just join a French project, who have way more experience.

We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.

There will be a referendum anyways, so I think it's unlikely the ban will actually be lifted.

• asdff

  today at 6:39 PM

  Hydro power is often brutal for the local environment. There has been a whole lot of expensive and careful undoing of hydro power around the world in recent years in attempt to save various local species from extinction. There are second order effects too like how silt is typically deposited in an unblocked vs blocked waterway and what that means for downstream land or water quality.

• abecedarius

  today at 3:41 PM

  "I expect they're too expensive" is a terrible reason to ban them, though.

  • gpm

    today at 4:17 PM

    It is when it's tied to "and I expect they're going to ask for giant subsidies from taxpayers".

    Which nuclear inevitably does, both in the form of direct requests for money and by refusing to pay for adequate insurance to compensate everyone who will be damaged in the event of a meltdown externalizing the risks.

    • abecedarius

      today at 5:01 PM

      If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper.

      (I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)

  • SiempreViernes

    today at 3:46 PM

    That's not why they were banned, and in any case lifting a ban on building something that nobody will build doesn't seem like good use of legislators time.

    • mpweiher

      today at 4:09 PM

      At least one Kanton has already requested a new build.

      https://www.nuklearforum.ch/de/news/neues-kernkraftwerk-im-a...

• IAmBroom

  today at 3:48 PM

  > building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then.

  That's a helluva prediction.

  Thorium reactors would be practically limitless in fuel supply, but we aren't getting them without seriously funded nuclear research. That is far less likely during a band on commercial stations.

  • Arodex

    today at 3:52 PM

    >Thorium reactors

    The same reactors nuclear powers with decades of experience haven't deployed?

    We will get two or three revolutions in solar power and battery technology before a single thorium reactor is viable. You could invest all the R&D budget of thorium reactors in perovskite panels and it would generate more MW per CHF invested.

I wish Italy did the same.

We still have to deal with the consequences of a referendum hold not so long after che Chernobyl accident which made it illegal to build and operate nuclear power plants.

• mpweiher

  today at 4:15 PM

  > I wish Italy did the same.

  They are in the process. Last I checked the bill to do so had passed the lower house and how needs to get ratified by the senate.

  https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/italian-bill-on-...

• Arodex

  today at 3:49 PM

  It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries. You even have the industrial prowess to make it all in the country step by step, whereas nuclear reactors are such humongous engineering projects that building the capacity is very out of reach.

  Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how are you going to cool down your reactors? Nuclear in Italy is a non-starter.

  • flextheruler

    today at 4:21 PM

    Solar, wind, and even hydroelectricity are too dependent upon the environment to make up the entire electricity generation capacity of any major industrial country. With renewables, even with batteries, the actual production is within a range. Couple that with demand also being in a range you get uncomfortable possibilities at play. And while colder water is definitely preferable for cooling, I'd have to imagine that if the bodies of water were actually becoming too hot to cool a nuclear reactor system there'd be bigger problems than energy production.

    • Perseids

      today at 6:48 PM

      The limit is not how cold the water needs to be for the power plant, but how hot it can be for the river ecology to not take (too much) damage. Even in Germany power plants regularly need to be shut down.

      > 2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to shut down their nuclear power plants partly or fully because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm (Barber, 2022; Limb, 2022; Miller and Vladkov, 2022). Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature (European Parliament and European Council, 2000; IKSR, 2022b). The resulting unplanned outages — and the efforts by nuclear operators to avoid such disruptions — highlight pressing concerns about the sustainability of nuclear energy, particularly its impact on river ecosystems in an increasingly warming world (see Fig. 1).

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...

  • ziotom78

    today at 4:09 PM

    > It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries

    Do you have any trustable source for this?

    • swiftcoder

      today at 4:35 PM

      I'd say "Supplementary Information for Strategic deployment of solar photovoltaics for achieving self-sufficiency in Europe throughout the energy transition"[1] fits the bill. It lays out various paths to 100% renewables (which in Italy, like in Spain, is heavily solar) by 20250

      [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61492-9.pdf

    • Arodex

      today at 4:20 PM

      Just look at any map of solar power potential, solar irradiance, hours of sunshine of Europe.

      • otikik

        today at 4:30 PM

        I think the question is more about the "and batteries" part than about the sunshine part.

        • ziotom78

          today at 4:43 PM

          Exactly

    • dieortin

      today at 4:17 PM

      Latitude?

  • Kipters

    today at 4:41 PM

    Why not both?

    We still need rotating mass to keep the grid stable, which means either building giant flywheels, keep burning gas or bring nuclear into the mix.

    One of these can also produce a ton of energy when needed, the other two cant.

    We can and should build more renewables, but we can't risk grid stability!

    • mrob

      today at 5:26 PM

      It's technically possible to replace rotating mass with batteries using a "grid-forming inverter", which is an inverter that converts the battery DC to AC with frequency varying depending on the grid load, simulating how that rotating mass would behave ("synthetic inertia"):

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource#Grid-f...

      This competes with the traditional giant flywheel option ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser ), which has the advantage of being a simple and proven technology, and handling brief overload better, but the disadvantage of having moving parts. It's not clear which option is currently best. Both are in current use.

    • iknowstuff

      today at 4:58 PM

      We actually don’t need those anymore. Grid forming inverters and batteries will take over that role.

• stefantalpalaru

  today at 4:22 PM

  [dead]

It's a world-wide competition to generate the most expensive electricity! The record is currently held by Vogtle in Georgia US, but Ontario Canada is trying to take the crown by spending $500B on nuclear.

• anon7725

  today at 3:58 PM

  Is there a cleaner, more consistent technology for baseload?

  At a certain point, dollars are funny money if you are destroying the environment to save a few now by generating baseload with a carbon-producing tech.

  Of course, let’s build the safest and most efficient nuclear that we can, but “its capex is too high” is not a compelling argument to me.

  And to be clear: renewables should form as much of the capacity as possible, but a reliable baseload is obviously still needed.

  • bryanlarsen

    today at 4:22 PM

    "Baseload" is load, not generation. It's not necessary -- for example the small northern grids that only have diesel generators operate fine even though they have no generators that don't have the capacity for quick cycling.

    Baseload was a cost optimization. Back in the day it was cheaper to build coal & nuclear plants that took days to power on. Somebody figured out that if a grid was built of a mix of those cheaper plants and more expensive plants that could start up quicker, it would lower costs. The typical grid was baseload coal and gas peakers. But ~20 years ago gas peakers became cheaper than baseload coal and any need or desire for baseload generation went away.

    China is building a lot of coal plants to complement their solar buildout. Notably these are not base load plants. Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night.

    Similarly, many new nuclear plant designs are not base load designs; they are designs that can be safely and quickly turned on and off.

    P.S. the correct term for generation is "non-dispatchable", not "baseload"

    • rayiner

      today at 5:35 PM

      > Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night

      That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it need not be. In this case, China is building coal plants to address the baseload that doesn’t go away at night when the solar isn’t producing.

  • tcfhgj

    today at 4:26 PM

    we don't need reliable "base load" but peakers - with more renewables more than ever.

    Baseload won't be price competitive with renewables in average or shiny/windy conditions ever

    • well_ackshually

      today at 5:01 PM

      you'll be so happy about being price competitive when the conditions are bad for like a week and the country just doesn't run (or rely on other countries price gouging you for what your country needs to exist.)

      Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible hand of the market hoping that price competitiveness means that it works well. Lives are at play.

      • Tepix

        today at 5:13 PM

        No. Nuclear is neither price competitive, nor is it available quick enough.

        Go fully renewable. Add batteries, like Google is doing. Just one example: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/24/google-to-deploy-worl...

      • bryanlarsen

        today at 5:23 PM

        > You need both

        Why do you need both? It's possible to get 99.99% reliability with wind & solar & batteries & weather modelling. There are multiple ways to handle a week long dankelflaute without nuclear: overbuilding, continental scale distribution, lots of batteries, etc. All are cheaper than nuclear.

        It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid, even a nuclear dominated one. Local distribution has many single points of failure.

        • zchrykng

          today at 6:04 PM

          How much do those batteries cost and can they supply power for multiple days or a season if your renewable sources aren't providing like normal?

          Not to mention the environmental damage from producing and disposing of batteries.

• mpweiher

  today at 4:07 PM

  That competition is handily won by wind and solar.

  In the meantime in Switzerland:

  "Our cheapest electricity product is nuclear electricity."

  https://ewr.ch/elektrizitaet/stromprodukte/

  • bryanlarsen

    today at 5:26 PM

    Yes, if you put the cost of commissioning and decommissioning the reactor onto your taxpayers instead of including it in the cost of power, nuclear can be very cheap. I didn't try and translate the German ; but that's the trick Ontario Canada uses to false claim that nuclear power is cheap.

  • Tepix

    today at 5:23 PM

    Existing nuclear power plants can be very cheap at $30 – $40 / MWh

    New nuclear power plants would be much more expensive at $180 / MWh or more, due to strict modern regulations. Even with these regulations, there is no nuclear plant that is safe against a terrorist crashing an airplane into it.

    The unsolved permanent repository problem is left to future generations.

    Finally, building a new nuclear power plant will easily take a decade or more.

    • whatisthiseven

      today at 5:45 PM

      Cool, the price of solar right now is $30-$85 / MWh, and that range is dependent on whether you got storage included in the bill or not.

      And that price will only get cheaper, as both the US and China continue ramping up production.

      Nuclear? It would need to reduce its costs by 70% to get where solar is now. And then do it again to be competitive with where solar+storage will be in 10 years.

      Nuclear is economically a dead technology.

Citizens should take note that no nuclear plants are ever built without many billions in state loans and guarantees.

It's not a cheap source of electricity, it's a way for someone to get money from taxpayers to subsidize their business.

• cloudie78

  today at 4:46 PM

  You should take note that you’re uninformed or intentionally spreading false information and misrepresenting reality.

  Fact of the matter is it takes a large upfront investment to build a nuclear reactor and it has a longer time horizon before it becomes profitable in comparison to something like a gas or coal power plant.

  It comes down to whether or not the country, government, citizens and country have the ability to think beyond a 4 year horizon or not.

  • Kon5ole

    today at 6:45 PM

    Everybody knows about the upfront cost, but the size and long tail of costs after the plant has been built, or when unforeseen events occur, is largely hidden from all financial statements. So much so that people actually believe that nuclear power is cheap, when it's not.

    But the truth surfaces of course - you can look at the financials of EDF in France (nationalized in 2022 with 60+ bn euros in debt), KEPCO in Korea (145 bn in debt), or incidents like Asse II in Germany, Sellafield in the UK, Rancho Seco in the US.

    Billions of taxpayer money covering costs caused by the nuclear industry, and not appearing anywhere in any statement of estimates of nuclear power costs. Large, double-digit plant operators basically or literally bankrupt.

    Different CEOs of the swedish electric company Vattenfall have stated repeatedly that nuclear power is not viable unless the state pays. Here is a recent such statement: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/swedis...

    This to me is the bottom line. If nuclear power was cheap and profitable, people would be in line to build them as soon as they get approval! Instead, they want money.

    The truth is that the industry sees no way to profitability here, except when they get access to current and future taxpayer money. This has always been the case for nuclear power and still is.

  • dukoid

    today at 4:57 PM

    Show us just a single NPP that is properly insured

  • esarbe

    today at 5:30 PM

    There's no false information there. Nuclear is complex and so expensive that despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel. It's also slow, with building times up to more than a decade.

    France tried it. Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives, makes about €3 billion per year in profits and has to invest about €150 billion in new reactors, upgrades, refits and infrastructure.

    Nuclear is just not worth the hassle.

    • orangecat

      today at 6:13 PM

      It always amuses me when nuclear power is the one area where the left becomes Very Concerned about excessive government spending.

      despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel

      Except for France which came up with the clever strategy of "not banning it", but that was apparently a mistake and they should have just used fossil fuels?

      Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives

      €50 billion for several decades of clean energy seems like a pretty good deal.

    • cryptonym

      today at 6:14 PM

      France also produces less CO2, sell electricity at reasonable and stable cost.

      If fossil fuel weren't massively subsided (impact the environment for free, wars with taxpayer money), Nuclear would have made a massive dent.

      Producing the same with other sources will have a massive immediate impact on the land / environment.

      • Kon5ole

        today at 6:49 PM

        I like the idea that fossil fuel should take the hit from the impact on the environment, but don't see why nuclear should at the same time get a free pass for Chernobyl and Fukushima. Surely nuclear needs to take the hit from those as well in order to make the comparison apples-to-apples?

    • zchrykng

      today at 6:12 PM

      It hasn't made a significant contribution because of panic after the various accidents and the "environmentalists" deciding to advocate against it when it was the clearest path to accomplishing their stated goals.

• eightysixfour

  today at 4:22 PM

  Energy security is something I expect the government to invest my tax dollars in especially energy generation that is resilient to international politics and reduced carbon emissions.

  • Arodex

    today at 4:29 PM

    Then nuclear isn't it.

    Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.

    The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs

    Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.

    • eightysixfour

      today at 5:39 PM

      > Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.

      It is reasonable to have a many-year strategic reserve of uranium for what you need. A modern reactor is going to go through 20 tonnes of enriched fuel a year and they refuel every 18-24 months. 5-10 years of security and stability is much, much better than oil and gas.

      > The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs

      There isn't enough room in my house for anymore people but there's enough room for a new couch. How can these things both be true? Probably because the two have entirely different requirements and "there isn't room" is shorthand for many, many things.

      Not saying they're right, this is just a bad counter-argument, especially since the alternatives all have the same problem.

      > Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.

      Yes, you need water capacity for cooling, about 2x as much as a gas plant for the same output. Definitely a trade-off. I don't know or care enough about Swiss water access to argue here.

    • BJones12

      today at 5:37 PM

      > has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country

      The uranium-producing countries are Kazakhstan, Canada, and Namibia. There is zero chance that you cannot get one of those to sell to you.

      > Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.

      Wut?

    • ttoinou

      today at 5:27 PM

      You can make decades stocks of the fissile source

    • suddenlybananas

      today at 4:41 PM

      >Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.

      What on earth are you talking about?

      • Arodex

        today at 4:55 PM

        Slight hyperbole, but nuclear reactors in Switzerland and France shut down more and more often because the water needed to cool them down is already too hot:

        https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-adaptation/beznau-nucle...

        It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers.

        • s1artibartfast

          today at 6:09 PM

          I think it would be more accurate to say "avoid killing the most vulnerable life" crossing the line would not be the end of the world.

• hereme888

  today at 4:40 PM

  The estimated levelized cost of electricity changes dramatically with financing cost: from roughly the low-$100s/MWh under cheap capital to well above $200/MWh under high capital-cost assumptions. But wasn't that the case for wind and solar too?

• ttoinou

  today at 5:19 PM

  Could we try to make companies compete and reduce a bit the amount of corruption ?

  Note that it’s similar with eoliens wind turbines, they are heavily subsidized

• functionmouse

  today at 4:22 PM

  Is that meaningfully different than modern coal and natural gas plants?

• kdheiwns

  today at 4:26 PM

  That's what infrastructure is, yes.

• paytonjjones

  today at 4:21 PM

  Por que no los dos?

• testing22321

  today at 4:40 PM

  Also absolutely minimum of 20 years to build it.

  So this is fixing nothing short term.

• doublepg23

  today at 4:21 PM

  ..as opposed to other green energy programs that received no government investment?

  ...or the externality-free fossil fuel industry?

Switzerland, Norway and Austria are probably the country that needs nuclear the less, but anything to start the discussion in other European countries is good.

Probably not economically viable in Switzerland though.

• _diyar

  today at 3:49 PM

  Hard disagree. As a. swiss voter, this is close to my heart.

  50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission.

  Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise.

  To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potential losses of hydro power as glaciers melt, nuclear + solar is the only real path for switzerland.

  • cogman10

    today at 4:02 PM

    Why hasn't Switzerland deployed solar/wind? That seems like a pretty big miss in general. The Swiss grid has almost no wind which is strange for such a mountainous nation. And solar is also quite low which is also strange given how much empty land exists in Switzerland along with it's relatively low latitude.

    • Plankaluel

      today at 4:36 PM

      Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol:

      The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.

      People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.

      • s1artibartfast

        today at 6:18 PM

        yeah, some it has been shaped by man, but that does not negate or invalidate the fact that they like it the way that it is.

        My clean dinner table is completely artificial, but that doesnt mean I should be neutral to someone placing a bowl of shit on it.

    • Arodex

      today at 4:31 PM

      See this long-form investigation:

      https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...

    • stymaar

      today at 4:15 PM

      See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587327

    • julkali

      today at 4:06 PM

      nimby

      • cogman10

        today at 4:11 PM

        Yeah, that seems like it'd be something that would also stop nuclear deployment.

    • shermantanktop

      today at 4:28 PM

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

      Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s

      I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.

  • pjc50

    today at 4:05 PM

    Where's the solar currently? Is it also victim to NIMBYs? Or shading?

    I can understand people objecting to plastering the south facing unshaded Alps with panels, but .. it would certainly generate a lot.

  • pmontra

    today at 5:02 PM

    As you are Swiss, where would you get the uranium from? I expect that the Swiss Alps have some mine, especially in the south west (I didn't check) but is that enough? You might end up swapping a dependency from foreign providers of oil and gas with a dependency from foreign providers of uranium.

    • empiricus

      today at 6:10 PM

      to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.

  • orwin

    today at 4:05 PM

    Like I said in another comment: nuclear only makes sense if you build it at scale, because you need very specific skills and knowledge that is hard to get to build it securely, on time and cheap. Ideally you would have one company/conglomerate that would get one plant off the ground per year across the EU, but currently that isn't possible.

    • includenotfound

      today at 4:11 PM

      I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else, but I guess the economic argument still holds.

      • Arodex

        today at 4:33 PM

        >I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else

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

  • AtlasBarfed

    today at 3:56 PM

    ...You guys have mountains everywhere, which means dirt cheap hydro energy storage for solar and wind?

    I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.

    And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.

    I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.

    I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.

    I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....

    I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.

    Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale

    • tribaal

      today at 4:01 PM

      Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.

      We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)

      • cogman10

        today at 4:05 PM

        Wind would be particularly effective in Switzerland and it's fast to deploy. The swiss grid has less than 1% wind which was pretty shocking to me. It seems like Switzerland has a particularly bad renewable story for an EU nation.

        • tribaal

          today at 4:18 PM

          Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule.

          The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).

          Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.

        • calvinmorrison

          today at 4:21 PM

          It's not in the EU. It is part of the Schengen Agreement.

        • jsnell

          today at 4:12 PM

          It's not an EU nation.

          • cogman10

            today at 4:14 PM

            Oh wow, I didn't realize that! That's crazy, basically everyone that borders them are EU members. I was also under the impression (but haven't checked) that it was pretty easy to cross the swiss border both into and out of the EU.

            • Arodex

              today at 4:35 PM

              Switzerland unilaterally got out of negotiations with the EU, which also dealt with energy grid coordination.

              As such, as of now, the EU can shut down Switzerland without warning if the grid is overloaded and they need to avoid a blackout.

            • estebank

              today at 4:28 PM

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

• marcyb5st

  today at 3:55 PM

  I think we (as in Switzerland) are preparing for a future in which there is not much snow melt/precipitations to fuel hydro production year round.

  In fact, if the AMOC weakens/stops then there will be a drastic drop in precipitation across Europe and funnily enough maybe the temperature drop so much that the little snow there will be won't melt in big enough quantities.

  Of course this is just a ban lift, meaning that there are no concrete plans to build one or more, but if there is a need to move "fast" (nuclear is not, I know) at least there is one less hurdle. I sincerily hope we invest in other technologies, especially now that Sodium batteries seem on their way to solve grid level storage, but I don't necessarily see this as a bad move per se.

• nrds

  today at 3:48 PM

  It is no coincidence that countries which need it least can unban it. Deindustrialization activists will focus their efforts on countries where the ban matters.

• jl6

  today at 3:55 PM

  Small land area, mountainous, northerly latitude… it’s not that wind and solar won’t work, but I don’t think you can automatically compare costs to giga-scale solar farms in spacious and sparsely populated equatorial countries. Even if more expensive, nuclear will have a niche, and it’s madness to rule it out.

• mrandish

  today at 3:52 PM

  Yes, it may be more of a symbolic gesture for Switzerland's own needs but it's still good to correct the historical error of prohibiting a broad range of potentially viable approaches from ever being considered.

• iso1631

  today at 3:46 PM

  With little land usable for solar and wind I was thinking that Switzerland and Austria would need it more

  Edit: Not Norway - Doh!

  • sisve

    today at 4:11 PM

    Norwegian here.

    - We have a lot of hydro, that are very cheap to produces and for some of the power plants we fill up water by using solar and wind when that is very cheap and generate power back when it's demand for it (meaning selling it expensive)

    -Norway export more then we are importing. But that could shift in the coming years.

    -Nuclear power are expensive, so with the current prices it do not make sense to have nuclear in Norway. Thought that could change (see point 2)

    - not sure what you mean by "little land usable", you can absolutely be correct. in terms of size we are bigger then Germany. But I'm not sure how much usable land there is vs other countries. We do not have that big population but it's spread out and no one wants a wind park in their neighborhood

    • iso1631

      today at 5:03 PM

      Sorry not sure why I wrote Norway rather than Austria!

      Obviously Norway has massive amounts of offshore wind potential too

  • marcyb5st

    today at 3:56 PM

    I think he was referring to hydro with all the mountains it is actually prime real estate for dams.

• philipwhiuk

  today at 3:29 PM

  They can always sell the electricity

  • this_user

    today at 3:30 PM

    It's far too expensive for that with how cheap renewables are making electricity. France is already struggling with that.

    • orwin

      today at 3:55 PM

      Technically yes, but also no. The European electricity market have way, way to many rules and caveat to draw any conclusion, especially France with ARENH and other distortions.

      It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.

      I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.

    • Chaosvex

      today at 3:57 PM

      Sure wish the UK could get some of this cheap renewable energy you're referencing.

    • mpweiher

      today at 4:12 PM

      That turns out not to be the case.

      France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.

      Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.

Like the F-35 fighter jet, this is just another victory for lobbyists in the industry who will be able to siphon public money into over-budget, deadline busting white whale projects that will never recoup its costs.

Especially nuclear. It is now economically non-viable.

• bit-anarchist

  today at 3:49 PM

  What lobbyists? Concrete powder companies? Other governmental companies?

  Keep in mind similar things have been said about solar and wind previously.

  • Arodex

    today at 4:06 PM

    Civil engineering, power equipment (ABB is a big firm in Switzerland), Energy companies (the market is Switzerland is a constellation of local monopolies, who have already announced they won't invest their own huge money reserves in nuclear, it will have to be all public money and garanties), etc.

• TiredOfLife

  today at 5:17 PM

  It it turns out like the F-35 it would be amazing. F-35 is much better and safer than what came before and more important CHEAPER per unit than previous generations.

Whether people like it or not, nuclear power is the path forward for the foreseeable future; at least until nuclear fusion becomes a reality. With incoming AI/automation, ya’ll need all the power ya can get.

• embedding-shape

  today at 5:58 PM

  Yeah what the hell, I want tiny and small nuke-batteries so we can finally get cars and phones that doesn't need charging anymore, would solve a lot of problems and surely won't introduce any new ones.

Tangentially related: the Swiss built a research-focused nuclear reactor in a cavern. It had a meltdown in 1969, and they were able to keep the decontamination/decommissioning efforts to a minimum by just entombing the thing in concrete.

Honestly, so long as the water table isn't too close, that's not a terrible place to put a nuclear reactor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor

Switzerland seems like a country where they wouldn't have trouble hiring enough very responsible serious people capable of running nuclear plants. Aside from being able to acquire fuel is there any reason they are not near 100% nuclear?

• b112

  today at 5:54 PM

  Yes. Environmentalists.

  There are people which want the best we can do (eg, no Ng, coal, etc) in electricity generation. Sensible reductions, that sort of thing. Then there are those that just want no electricity to be used at all, ever, period.

  They'll complain about hydroelectric(carbon in cement production), about things which can happen with nuclear(accidents), about birds in windmills, about the production methods of making solar panels, and so on. To such people, doing anything is bad for the environment, so therefore, every type of power generation is bad.

  To listen to such people is, of course, madness, as is listening to all extremists. We should simply ignore them completely, but of course the news exists, fake protestors exist which are paid, and so on and so forth.

There is no prosperity without stable and cheap energy.

Great news, just hoping the people understand this as well.

This is at best the concept of a vibe shift. Even if they started sprinting now, it would be 20 years before anyone would see the results of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear is so much more expensive than solar and wind that building one is certain to raise electricity prices.

• dukoid

  today at 4:59 PM

  It's why big oil loves it: We need to do nothing now because nuclear is coming "soon"

Swiss will get nukes, denmark will get nukes, sweden will get nukes, finland will get..poland, ukraine, germany, armenia, georgia, armenia, turkey, vietnam, japan, south korea, emirates all gonna get, saudi already got.. [this list is incomplete, you can help to complete this list by doing a empire]. Ironically during the cold war a ton of countries went and became almost nuclear powers. Now thos world is so back baby and the reality denial and loud noises do nothing. Almost as if this plot device never had any connection to anything.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uxLHWVYRg&t=534s

A long-form exploration of energy in Switzerland for those interested:

https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...

They have a pretty small population, but wind will likely be intolerable because it will harm views[0]. Solar requires surface area as well. So that leaves hydro, which they'll have to pump during the summer months to ensure they have coverage for winter, or nuclear. Or fossil fuels, of course. Gas is still probably optimal for them. I suppose that's the nature of things. We all care very much about the climate, but we do care about our views more.

0: I personally like the look of wind turbines but I understand many don't. The appearance is likely why the Trump administration canceled such projects.

that's just lifting the ban and is pure virtue signaling. none of the electricity producers in switzerland actually want build nuclear power plants, because they are way too expensive.

• flanked-evergl

  today at 3:52 PM

  Much cheaper to outsource all production and industry to China as Europe is doing.

While I'm sold on the fact that modern nuclear can be built & administered safely in the face of natural disasters, and is a net good environmentally, I'm worried about corporate cronyism's corrosive effects on safety (a la Fukushima) and future instability in the form of cornered animals (e.g. Putin, Trump) acting erratically by bombing civilian infrastructure.

Keeping the option open seems prudent. The hard part is winter reliability, not summer generation.

RemindMe! -20 year

One of the little gems the Russians pulled off in the twenty aughts when they were flooding nonprofits in the USA with dirty money was hijacking the green movement to promote fracking. (Because surely ANYTHING is better than those dastardly electrons or whatever the fuck radiation is made of)

Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants, and with advances in breeder technology new plants doesn't nessecarily mean new mining operations, which often are quite harsh on the surrounding area.

• rsync

  today at 4:43 PM

  “Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants …”

  I would have said that about the Japanese as well…

Best way to provide power to a population over 10 million

• JumpCrisscross

  today at 2:36 PM

  And if the world goes to shit again, having a baseline for building an Alpine nuclear deterrent isn't the worst thing to have on soil.

  • philipkglass

    today at 3:39 PM

    Switzerland has several operating nuclear reactors:

    https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

    Switzerland also studied nuclear weapons production until 1988:

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

    If the Swiss thought it was in the national interest to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and crash-develop a nuclear deterrent, I think that they could achieve nuclear breakout quickly.

• iso1631

  today at 3:48 PM

  Best way for who?

  Nuclear is vastly more expensive per MWh than renewables. It's better than pumping stuff out the ground sure, but that's about it.

  • iso1631

    today at 5:13 PM

    And as usual the nuclear brainwashed lobby on HN still think it's 1990 and nuclear is cost effective.

    It can't cope with peaks. It has to generate the same power 24/7 to be anywhere near economical at two-three times the cost of solar+storage, so it either needs massive storage or massive overprovision

    Lets say you have a peak demand of say 40GW but average demand of 600GWh a day (25GW), or 219TWh a year

    Lets also say you have to shut down a plant for a week a year for maintenence

    You need to build five, 10GW plants to meet your demand.

    They provide 5 * 10GW * 24 hours * 7 days * 51 weeks or 428TWh.

    If nuclear is $110 per MWh, that means it's going to cost you $47b a year to generate your power requirement, or $215 per MWh

    So you're needing to roll out storage, same as you do for wind and solar, or spend twice as much on overproducing.

• rz2k

  today at 3:35 PM

  I wonder if they’ll stagger their waking hours so that electric power consumption matches the inflexible output of nuclear reactors.

  • IAmBroom

    today at 3:49 PM

    Storage is a thing.

    • Arodex

      today at 3:53 PM

      If storage is a thing, then solar makes more sense.

  • appplication

    today at 4:12 PM

    If only there were a supplemental daylight-based power source that precisely matched peak output to waking hours.

...but nobody wants to build it: https://www.bluewin.ch/de/news/schweiz/die-schweiz-kann-wied...

fantastic!

Excellent.

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[dead]

Those energy conglomerates are really desperate for public money aren't they? Sorry guys, solar and wind are cheaper

AI made this inevitable. Every country will follow.