this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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Isn’t solar already insanely inexpensive when compared to all other energy sources?
Nuclear isn't a replacement for other renewable resources and people need to stop thinking of it as such. As soon as I see that comparison, it is apparent that the poster either:
That last one is only partially true. Grid-scale battery tech has come a long way. And it works phenomenally well as a sort of capacitor to help smooth out grid power and to provide some capacity during the natural lulls in most renewable options like wind and solar when they can't generate. However, there is no battery solution currently on this planet that can provide the power necessary for an entire active grid region for the amount of time renewables aren't generating, like solar overnight, when there's simply no wind to utilize. There is still a base load level needed to provide power regardless of natural forces.
Nuclear is a replacement for the base power load that is currently handled by fossil fuels like Coal and Natural Gas. Much of the spent fuel can now be recycled for reuse even in the same reactors. Some new experimental reactor designs also use spent nuclear fuel from current, mostly 1970's era, designs to provide seed fuel for their reactor processes.
Most nuclear waste, is also short to medium half-life waste, and will decay within years or decades, not millennia. The actual long term-nuclear waste is a very small portion of the total "waste" produced. And even then, most regulations still use Liner No Threshold for their storage requirements, despite virtually no actual nuclear physicists or scientists supporting LNT anymore with hundreds of studies since the 1950s proving it has no basis in reality. If LNT was in fact reality, then radiotherapy for cancer wouldn't work, and we know it does. People in regions like the Colorado Plateau around Denver, receive around 3x the annual radiation dose limit of a nuclear plant worker, simply from the background radiation in the area, yet they have lower than average cancer rates.
Nuclear is the technology we have NOW to be able to remove our reliance on fossil fuels, but the public needs to be educated about reality, not just having the same misinformation spread about constantly online.
Again, how much is that? Nuclear is not feasible unless cost can go down by a massive amount. No amount of massive text walls will convince people that multiplying their electric bill is a good idea.
Maybe AI companies can pay for those nuclear power plants. They’re the ones wasting all our power and water on stupid shit.
Fossil fuels are only as cheap as they are because of subsidies. We should remove the fossil fuel subsidies from the equation then if we want to talk actual cost.
That's about $30 Billion each year in the US, $660 Billion or so internationally. And that's only direct subsidies. Granted, that's total fossil fuel subsidies not just energy related, it's much more complicated to split it out, and this is a random Lemmy comment so not worth the time.
And since we don't really tax carbon pollution at any discernable level, if we actually required that to be included for the environmental damage from fossil fuel energy production, since we do require nuclear plants to plan for their waste production, it wouldn't be even close to competitive at all.
Isn’t most new power generation being built renewables?
I agree that fossil fuels should lose their subsidies and pay for the damage they’re causing to our environment.
Nuclear is not feasible and will never be.
For starters, it's expensive. Really expensive. Insanely expensive. It also takes years to go online, and decades to decomission (which should be paid by the owner, but sometimes ends up being paid by the government because the owner went bankrupt or exploited a loophole). It's also not quickly variable, so it needs a very constant demand.
Instead of investing in nuclear, one could invest in solar and wind. The latter can produce energy all day long, and if you have enough locations with wind farms, it starts averaging out and becoming constant. Both wind and solar are also quickly variable, so they can easily adapt to demand. They're incredibly inexpensive and pay for themselves in a few years.
Batteries in the distribution network aren't a good idea, and they're also probably not gonna work. Even though they're still cheaper than a nuclear plant, they're pretty expensive and they have a lot of wear. Technologies have been advancing really fast, and we already have prototypes that look promising. However, they don't make that much sense when you look at alternatives like pumped hydro. Pumped hydro is cheap, has a lot of capacity, can also quickly adapt to demand, and requires less maintenance than nuclear or batteries.
Another solution for energy storage is personal battery storage, which people install in their homes. Almost everyone who has solar already has a battery in their house, and even people without solar buy batteries to charge during the night and use up during the day. These batteries can be made with recycled electric car batteries, so they're also carbon neutral and cheap.
And this is all without touching on the real issue of nuclear waste, which nuclear promoters always sweep under the rug. Yes, the amount of nuclear waste produced is minuscule. Yes, it's not dangerous at all as long as it's properly dealt with. Yes, it's still better than the massive amounts of pollution that fossil fuels create. But it's still a form of pollution, it's dangerous when mishandled, and most importantly, it has to be kept in storage facilities for thousands of years. Those storage facilities are paid for by governments, which in turn are financed by our taxes. And we can only keep building them, because no waste goes out and new waste keeps going in. So even if the number in our electricity bill is small, we still pay more costs related to nuclear with our taxes.
TL:DR: Nuclear is expensive and slow to build and doesn't adapt well to the variability of demand. Renewables, especially solar and wind, are cheap and effective, and there are many ways (not just batteries) to efficiently store excess energy to use during periods of low production. Nuclear also generates waste, which even though it may not be dangerous, is still expensive to store for thousands of years.
Disclaimer: I'm not endorsing fossil or non-renewable energy in any way, I'm all for net zero energy production. But nuclear is not net zero and not a good solution. We can completely ditch fossil fuels without relying on nuclear, and it can work. I live in a country where we're decomissioning nuclear plants and we generate more than 50% of our electricity from renewables. On average, we generate close to the same amount of energy from wind than from nuclear (~20%).
This is a decade outdated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
Not sure which country you live in, but Germany killed nuclear and skyrocketed coal and gas use, just to make some hippies happy.
Most new nuclear installations are SMRs. Currently at $250M but with scale will be half that in a decade.
SMRs are snake oil. No SMR has really been built, and they share the exact same problems as "normal" nuclear. They're expensive, still super slow to deploy, expensive to maintain and still produce waste. And all without the econony of scale which is what helps big nuclear reactors be "affordable". You can read multiple articles on them, but here's an example.
https://www.theenergymix.com/the-nuclear-mirage-why-small-modular-reactors-wont-save-nuclear-power/
Archived version:
https://archive.is/jcf0C
Costs are inflated on purporse
Can be easily proven by someone with enough money to build one. None of the billionaires seem to lining up to build one with their own money.
Do not mistake the opportunity cost for inviability. Billionaires are not lining up to build one with their money may be a fact (I don't know), but even if it is, it is entirely possible that the rate of return is just too low for them to consider investing in. Why make 3% EV YoY when you could get 5% EV YoU? Almost double the rate of return!
Not so easily proven.
Not true. Google bought seven SMRs for their AI farms.
To be fair, that's how they became billionaires in the first place.
Exactly
Billionaires have tons of influence on information with their ability to easily manipulate bots and algorithms. I don’t want to see any pro-nuclear stuff online without a trustworthy price tag.
Residential solar cost per MWh is much more expensive than other sources, because many small generators is a more expensive (but more resilient) way to build power production.
Grid-scale solar plants are one of the most cost-effective ways to generate electricity. Only wind turbines are competitive in cost per MWh, and the real-world cost of any installation depends on the specifics of the particular installation (land value, insolation, wind patterns, scale, etc).
Yeah, there’s no point in investing too much into more expensive tech unless there’s a possibility that it will become the less expensive option in the future.
For example, sodium-ion batteries are about to eat lithium-ion’s lunch. Sodium is equal or better in almost every way but it comes in much less expensive.
For grid storage, Ambri has the cheapest possible molten salt battery. The company was struggling.
The MIT Prof who started this is Don Sadoway, he started this 13 years ago and no one gives a fuck in the US. Right idea, wrong country. The US grid is ruled by corruption and middle men reselling electricity -no one wants a cheaper solution.
This guy just gives an amazing lecture.
By 2024, Ambri was bankrupt. Reddit and Lemmy seem to think countries want real energy solutions, which is just not true. Corruption rules the energy grid.
It's cheaper but not consistent enough for practical use. You cannot have a grid where the voltage goes up and down randomly. Some small countries have this and you never know if you plug something in if it will work. AI farms suck gigawatts of electricity.
iirc solar depends on well, solar energy, so it is best paired with another more stable source of energy.
Like batteries which are also dropping in price every year. That’s what utilities are already doing.
Nobody is trying to build nuclear plants to back-up their solar panels.
The largest battery banks in the world can provide a meager few minutes of grid power.
Battery storage is beyond infeasible at this time. Pumped hydro is far more cost effective, but limited to certain geographical locations, and often quite limited in capacity.
Battery storage is used for smoothing not to provide grid power.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of How much energy is required to provide base load.
My point is that utilities are already building the more effective and efficient technologies for their areas. Nobody is trying to build nuclear because it simply costs too much.
Social media ( here, Reddit) is filled with nerds obsessed with pushing nuclear mostly because they think it’s cool without a single serious consideration for the total costs.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
China's State Council has approved ten or more new reactors for construction each year since 2022.
Notable SMRs in China include: Linglong One (ACP100): This is the world's first commercial, land-based SMR.
Status: The first unit is nearing completion at the Changjiang Nuclear Power Plant in Hainan province. Capacity: It has a capacity of 125 MWe.
Approval: In 2016, it was the first SMR design to pass an independent safety review by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
HTR-PM: This is a high-temperature gas-cooled SMR. Status: A demonstration project at the Shidaowan plant in Shandong province began commercial operation in December 2023.
Capacity: It consists of twin 250 MW thermal reactors, generating 210 MWe. TMSR-LF1: China is also developing a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR). Status: A demonstration reactor with a 10 MWe capacity was under construction in late 2025.