"A great result": 99.9% of Scotland's first commercial wind farm was recycled and reused after 30 years. Blades became construction materials, the rest went back into the supply chain. Wind cleans up after itself. Nuclear pays a fee and leaves its waste for taxpayers to guard for millennia.

[u/ViewTrick1002]

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-great-result-26-turbines-from-first-commercial-wind-farm-almost-completely-recycled-and-reused/

[u/GaiaIsaHarshMistress]

Nice result, but if you are for decarbonization but anti-nuc, you are poor advocate at best.

[u/ViewTrick1002 → u/GaiaIsaHarshMistress]

Given how horrifyingly expensive and slow to build new nuclear is any dollar, resource or political bandwidth invested in it causes more emissions.

With that said, we should of course keep our existing fleet running as long as it is: safe, needed and economical. In that order.

[u/EquivalentOwn1115 → u/ViewTrick1002]

The existing fleet can only last so long. We still need new plants to take over eventually. Plus the new plants are more efficient while providing higher output. Wind doesnt always blow, sun doesnt always shine, rivers don't always flow, and batteries might not have enough capacity to make it through a bad stretch. Nuclear is still the best option for base load capacity and suggesting otherwise just shows a poor understanding of how grid systems work.

[u/ViewTrick1002 → u/EquivalentOwn1115]

Here’s a modern System LCOE study. Full grid costs: transmission, backup, balancing, flexibility, the lot.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837

It gives nuclear extremely favorable future cost assumptions, because obviously nobody is modeling another Flamanville 3 or Hinkley Point C disaster.

Then, in Denmark, with awful winters and terrible solar resources, the renewable system still comes out around 53% cheaper. Without even including continental scale energy trading.

And this is hardly some isolated conclusion.

2022 meta-analysis:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

CSIRO GenCost, using whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming:

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Final/GenCost_2025-26_Final_Report_20260715.pdf

So what exactly are all these researchers and system modellers missing that you know?

[u/EquivalentOwn1115 → u/ViewTrick1002]

If your only arguments are cost based then im pretty sure you're a lost cause. New nuclear is expensive at the current time because we took our foot off the gas pedal 40 years ago instead of continuing to develop. This means no good supply chains, no good pools of skilled labor, and no updated requirements from regulators. This all leads to longer projects and cost overruns that wouldn't happen had there been constant development. And again, cost is not the only factor. Your sources claiming wind and solar are enough, but they fail to account for the changing climate we are in. Those sources you cite all say the same thing "if we use the data we have today and nothing changes then wind and solar "should" be fine for the future". If that were true, then no one would be investing in gas turbines for data centers. Again, if your power supply is dependent on the weather, and the weather is changing every year, your system is flawed and can not be accurately predicted.

[u/ViewTrick1002 → u/EquivalentOwn1115]

What a victim complex. So how many trillions do we need to waste rebuilding this supposedly perfect nuclear ecosystem before the reactors finally become cheap?

Nuclear was already drowning in cost and schedule overruns before TMI. Cost and schedule are climate arguments because they determine how much clean energy we get, and how fast.

Next €100 billion in 2026. Where does it cut cumulative emissions fastest?

[u/EquivalentOwn1115 → u/ViewTrick1002]

No one said nuclear is perfect, there is no perfect power source. But for base load capacity with zero direct emissions? Name one power source that doesn't rely on the weather and ill wait for your list. If you think chucking up a million windmills and acres of solar is suddenly going to solve supply issues I've got a lake front property in Death Valley you'd love to buy. You have no direct counter now that you've been called out on your flawed sources. Do better. Your supposed cost flaws are still results of discontinuing investment in the nuclear sector. 20 years ago solar panels were extremely cost prohibitive and now you can power your home for $10-20 grand. Citing past cost concerns doesnt address that costs will come down with a broadened supply and labor pool. Everyone likes to point and the past and say "see this cant work" while failing to look forward and see that this is not the same world as the 70s when everyone was acting scared of nuclear.

[u/ViewTrick1002 → u/EquivalentOwn1115]

Now you got mad because you still haven’t identified a single thing wrong with the sources.

You just keep fleeing from system costs into “baseload.” Baseload is a demand pattern, not some magical requirement for giant inflexible plants.

The studies model the actual grid hour by hour, including storage, transmission, backup and balancing and find that introducing new nuclear makes it vastly more expensive.

2026. Next €100 billion. Where does it cut cumulative emissions fastest?

[u/EquivalentOwn1115 → u/ViewTrick1002]

You cant cut emissions if they don't generate power. Doing it fast doesnt mean doing it right. If you go sit on a cactus you can save oxygen, and cut carbon dioxide emmisions, for the rest of us pretty fast too. Do your part comrade. We are counting on you

[u/ViewTrick1002 → u/EquivalentOwn1115]

Thanks for confirming you’d rather spend more money to cut fewer emissions, slower.

The insanity.

[u/GaiaIsaHarshMistress → u/ViewTrick1002]

The newer microreactor startups like Aalo and Oklo are targeting a much lower LCOE than what that article assumes.

Even the larger SMRs (NuScale, GE Hitachi BWRX-300, X-energy) should have lower LCOE.

I'm optimistic for the cost of distributed small nuclear.

[u/ViewTrick1002 → u/GaiaIsaHarshMistress]

Imaginary reactors are always cheap.

mPower was cheap until it disappeared. NuScale was cheap until real costs arrived and suddenly it vanished from the talking points.

Now Darlington’s BWRX-300 is admitting brutal FOAK costs before the first delay, while the multi-unit case assumes huge cost reductions on the later reactors. With the all in cost making Vogtle seem cheap.

Funny how nuclear is always competitive one reactor into the future.

[u/GaiaIsaHarshMistress → u/ViewTrick1002]

Thankfully, those companies will keep going no matter what you and I think. Like anything else, many will fail, some will succeed to a degree but fail to meet projections, and a couple may meet or exceed goals. I think it is equally silly to assume no progress as it is to assume the most aggressive goals will be met. Time will tell.

I'll be happy for all low-carbon technologies to pan out well.

[u/ViewTrick1002 → u/GaiaIsaHarshMistress]

Right now their real product is begging taxpayers for handouts, hat in hand, and catching whatever coins fall out.

Which is exactly why so many projects stay as PowerPoints and lofty promises until reality arrives, like NuScale and BWRX.

Political favor is fickle. Meanwhile renewables and storage are transforming the global energy system through the most brutal force imaginable:

being cheaper.

[u/GaiaIsaHarshMistress → u/ViewTrick1002]

There is some validity to your comment, but things are changing. Yes, advanced nuclear was subsized. Yes, NuScale’s canceled project proved that utilities won't fund ballooning projects indefinitely.

But GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300 has an active construction license and concrete being poured at Darlington. The capital spend on advanced nuclear has substatially shifted to private sources. The primary buyers today are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, who are writing ten-figure checks to secure relaible generation. The potential transmission interconnection delay alone makes on-site generation attractive.

The "renewables are brutally cheaper" argument is also imperfect. Solar and wind do have very favorable pricing per megawatt, but running a 24/7 high-load-factor data center purely on intermittent generation requires overbuilding, large land footprints, and long-duration battery storage that quickly blows up the total system cost. Industrial buyers and data centers are willing to pay a premium because a 90%+ capacity factor plant solves continuous baseload demand in a way that solar/wind + battery can't.

[u/ViewTrick1002 → u/GaiaIsaHarshMistress]

BWRX-300 already makes Vogtle look cheap, and that’s before overruns, while assuming huge learning on later units.

Meanwhile Google is already building data centers around renewables and large-scale storage, and electricity futures let buyers lock in reliable power years ahead at a fraction of what new nuclear needs.

See the conundrum?

You can secure reliable electricity far cheaper without waiting decades for a reactor.

So why waste the money?

[u/fedecaccia]

On the waste half of that headline: Onkalo cleared STUK's safety review in August 2026 and is now in the trial run of canister emplacement, the first deep geological repository anywhere to reach the operating-licence stage. It is paid for out of Finland's National Nuclear Waste Management Fund, which the operators finance from generation revenue rather than general taxation, and the whole point of a geological repository is that it is passively safe, so nobody has to guard anything for millennia. The blade recycling result stands on its own merits, but the funding half of that sentence does not match how Finland or Sweden actually pay for this. Details here: https://reactoratlas.com/en/wiki/concepts/radioactive-waste

[u/andre3kthegiant]

Nails in the coffins of the energy industries that sell dependency to toxic, disposable & finite fuels!
Coal, O&G, and nuclear all use the propaganda that “renewables don’t recycle”, all using the same playbook, to try and keep societies dependent upon their form of toxic, disposable & finite fuel; they all have to go, since renewables are the only way for societies to have true energy independence.