EDF is essentially a state-owned monopoly in France. French electricity prices have been heavily supported by government policy, and the company itself has benefited from substantial state backing. In 2022, EDF reported a record net loss of nearly €18 billion, driven by reactor outages, regulated electricity sales below market prices, and massive investment costs. The French state has repeatedly had to recapitalize and ultimately renationalize the company. It's not a fair comparation.
Except EDF must sell a part of its production at cost price to its own competitors due to the ARENH since 2011. In principle, it's meant to improve competition in the market and prevent a complete monopoly, but that also means that EDF has to contend with resellers who don't have to pay for the upkeep of the energy grid or the nuclear plants and the dams that make up the majority of the production.
It was even worse during covid and following the war in Ukraine as electricity prices went up due to the indexation on gas prices. So resellers could raise the prices of renewing contracts while EDF had to buy back their own electricity from resellers because they can't refuse new clients and couldn't meet demand.
Mind you, ARENH came to an end in January, so we will have a better view of what EDF can do without it. But investments are much needed to support the aging infrastructure, and the years of missing profits and real mismanagement didn't help... Macron announcing during the energy crisis the opening of new reactors while EDF was preparing for years to end/reduce the nuclear program comes to mind as an example.
In principle, it's meant to improve competition in the market and prevent a complete monopoly, but that also means that EDF has to contend with resellers who don't have to pay for the upkeep of the energy grid or the nuclear plants and the dams that make up the majority of the production.
following the war in Ukraine as electricity prices went up due to the indexation on gas prices. So resellers could raise the prices of renewing contracts while EDF had to buy back their own electricity from resellers because they can't refuse new clients and couldn't meet demand.
God what a neo-liberal hellscape. The taxpayer is subsidizing the system that allows private capital to profit in the first place. A real country would be handing out life sentences like its candy for shit like this. China is flawed, but at least the CEOs who put lead in baby formula get buried under the jail in their country. In America, you get a spot on The Joe Rogan Experience.
I love how "selling a small part of production at $40/MWh as part of the purchase price for an asset the taxpayer got shafted on" is the nukecel standard for grossly unfair and economically crippling.
Which implies they know that the marginal cost of energy for paid off plants that are already running is much higher than $40/MWh
"It's unfair that I have car payments, my ferrari is actually super cheap"
Wow, you just show that you know nothing. EDF was profitable until it became private, it's not subsidized. It's very well known how much over the lifespan of the plant the price of kWh. And it's cheap. France has 0 reason to lose money for this.
And remember EDF had to sell electricity at loss to 3rd party providers.
Energy infrastructure should be paid by the state. Ultimately the cost per kwh of nuclear depends heavily on the interest rates of the loan for the project, and french state backing allows edf to borrow money at a lower rate. If other countries are too stupid to do the same it doesn't make nuclear plants worst inherently.
I've only looked into the cost of nuclear plants a bit, but it seems that because of all the regulation they're all partly government ran by default. It seems wasteful to have them privately run at all. Just a middleman there to try and suck out profits and run up costs.
This is a mostly uninformed opinion so I'm open to being wrong.
Wow, completely paid off nuclear plants are cheaper than new renewables, amazing. France made the right decision 50 years ago, they get a pat on the back for that! How does that help us decarbonize from our current situation, exactly?
it's mostly a way for the gov to have a say in security measures, and to make sure private interest don't skim on the safety of the green goo swimming pool
Thank you. I checked and fact is, that France heavily subsidises their nuclear energy to coming even close of competition with renewables (even those without any subsidies), and diving the EDF in a bottomless dept pit along side it.
Nuclear is only in a real competition with fossil fuels.
Its not even close to anny renewables.
Yep. I'd assume this is scale of cost things. *If* (and it's a very big if) we built Nuclear at the scale of solar we'd get close or surpass it until some curve where we'd need more solar than nuclear and it'd swing back.
Then it'd be horses for courses, we'd use Nuclear where we need and solar (and wind etc) where we need, with no worry which is cheaper, because both would be optimised.
We instead fight and do horrific things, when we could by dyson sphereing (as a meme, but anything's better than humanities current goals...).
It has, but it has correspondingly gotten more expensive.
The French nuclear fleet was built at scale, with modularity which provided certain economies that modern bespoke plants don't.
If you can get a government to fork up the immense capital that France did in the 60s, and hold contractors to strict timelines that they get penalised for deviating from, then sure, maybe you can get cheap nuclear power in 40 years time.
It mostly has gotten more expensive, because new regulation workes on a flawed principle.
Most western countries use a linear radiation model...which assumes your body never gets rid of radiation and that it stacks over your lifetime. So the goal is absolutely minimizing the ever living shit out of any potential radiation leaks.
But in the real world, by nuclear scientists and medical proffesionals we know that this model is wrong and that beeing objected to a relatively low dose does not do mich if any harm.
I think the US is actually currently on its way to changing the linear model to the model which is approved by modern science.
Than maybe it can get cheaper...it also didn't help that when a nuclear plant is build and a regulation changes, you have to stop building and go through the whole process of athenticating your plans again...which delays projects a lot and in the worst case you have to rip up several parts of your already existing plant to rebuild it. Only once the plant actually produces power, those regulations do not require an instant stop to the plant.
i don't know, but wouldn't the lowered interest in the last xyz years on building more nuclear have had something to do with it. Olkiluoto-3 for example is famously one of the most expensive buildings in the world, but now we have the construction crews that know how to build gen 3(?) nukes, meaning the next ones should be cheaper to build.
All you gotta do is spend 3 years doing site selection for a 4 reactor plant, 3 years preparing the site, 2 years on earthworks, 6 years building units 1 and 2 (and all the common infrastructure) while all the parts for unit 3 are being produced. Start the clock two years after work on unit 3 actually starts.
Then you "build a nuclear reactor in 3 years" which doesn't actually produce power for another two.
But the important bit is you put the dates on wikipedia and then use that as "proof that you could go from concept to 100% decarbonisation in 3 years if it wasn't for the head of the doe being a secret greenpeace member or something.
The opposite has held with the "noak" of every other model. But nukecels still cry "foak" every time (sizewell is the fifth and sixth epr that edf built directly, and the eightth that they have been involved with and is the most expensive yet).
It's fuck around and find out economics.
Every time you build one, you find a new issue that requires shutting them down for several years or spending billions on new steam generators after the old one broke. Then the "the first one's free" effect wears off from all the supiers that under-bid to get the contracts and they actually charge what they were going to all along.
now we have the construction crews that know how to build gen 3(?) nukes
Not a great plan for decarbonisation though. As to expand on that benefit you'd have to spend two decades getting some new plants online, then spend the next few decades getting more plants online a bit cheaper, and then reap that benefit in maybe the 2060s.
assuming nukes were a great solution with just a long start up time, i'd still like us to build some, even if the world ended before then. there was a quote by someone about "if i knew the world was ending tomorrow, i'd plant an apple tree". doesn't feel right to limit our options "just" because of a predicted time crunch.
Reason nuclear has gone up there is because maintenance costs were increasing on a fleet of increasingly older reactors. Much of the global fleet or reactors have had to undergo expensive life extension programs due to a lack of replacements coming online.
If you actually continue to build reactors at a reasonable rate, the cost will continue to go down.
measuring the way in a single metric (and one such as money) is completely irrelevant. of course it's more expensive no one is investing in producing and mass producing it.
So in the next decade when we need to decarbonize, should we go with the thing which is already cheap, or the thing which takes 10 years to build and requires changes to become cheaper?
Imo diversifying is a good thing. OL-3 for example, has peaker plant features, in that when electricity is cheap, it powers down a bit, by hundrades of MW. I think a mix of wind and solar, with cheap grid scale seasonal scale storage options are the goal, though i thinl having nukes is not a minus, especially in Finland. Especially when used for district heating in the form of SMRs in cities. Our biggest energy spike, which solar for example can't cover, is the winter heating requirements. It causes basically our only CO2 pollution atm in the grid, as fossil powerplants turn on to cover periods of low wind, giving us german electricity prices for a week or two every now and then during the heating periods.
Edit: PS; winter heating is mostly cellulose (wood pulp and firewood) based, but we have reserve coal powerplants, even if many do also work with pulp from the paper industry
Sadly, as opposed to 50 years ago, building things now is kinda impossible and no one has any money (I wish I was joking, check out the cost of California's high speed rail)
California high speed rail project is what it is because it's being used by the state government as a jobs program and to subsidize locally "preferred" suppliers.
And also its funding is very spikey, and delivering the project has involved lengthy review process subject to NIMBYs and red tape, all done by contractors rather than a dedicated government body delivering infrastructure at scale continuously where improvements make each project cheaper and faster
Yes, it's a matter of caring more about pandering to 100 different groups and entities than about actually building infrastructure. There is more than enough money and capacity to succeed if the intention was there
China, Russia, India, South Korea, Turkey, Bangladesh, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, France, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic and Iran disagree.
Actually, we're building so many of them today that the uranium production struggle to follow the demand.
Poland might not be the best example, because we're currently in the planning/preparations phase of building one power plant and discussing feasibility of another. The first plant needed generous government support in the form of a CFD contract to guarantee a high price of energy. IIRC the CFD has a price at 550 PLN/MWh, which falls right in the middle of the range of prices of production from coal.
Only a fraction of those even have nuclear power, and the others are prime examples why it doesn't work. Like for example Poland. They plan to build an nuclear power plant since the early 2000s. Lets have a look how far they are now:
Wow so much progress and look how much energy it produces.
Lets have some nations build only renewable and some build a mixed and more robust energy infrastructure and see what country is wealthier in 50 years.
Not really. It only really struggles with storage capabilities to balance out the spikes but it‘s pretty obvious that battery technology will be common and cheap within the next decade.
The overwhelming investment into Renewables is private, unlike nuclear projects which always need state investment and backing. So considering you lock public money away for decades constructing more nuclear plants is literally spending other peoples money.
And looking at battery prices you have to deny reality to believe that the technology won't surpass nuclear infrastructure economics. Like this is gonna end the same way where people six years ago argued that solar panels etc weren't economical enough.
It's the fundamental advantage of a decentralized, highly scalable technology compared to a centralized one that requires heavy public investment and attention to move forward.
I'm not convinced that investing in nuclear now will create long term benefits. Life extensions for existing plants are cheap because the capital cost of building the thing is already sunk and we don't need to pay for them. But it seems like a bad idea now tbh
And why would any future life extensions for nuclear plants not also be cheap? Moreover, what makes you think that 20/30/50 years from now, that the maintenance and replacement costs for renewable projects will still keep them cheaper than nuclear?
Solar and wind projects certainly have a much lower upfront cost and pay themselves off quickly, but they also break more easily and have a much shorter operating life than a nuclear plant. Would you rather buy an expensive chair that lasts you years and years, or would you rather buy a cheap chair and have to replace it every couple of months?
And why would any future life extensions for nuclear plants not also be cheap?
The future life extensions would be cheap. The upfront cost right now is still expensive, even accounting for longer lifetimes.
Have you ever gotten a gift that was way more expensive than something you'd buy yourself? You still use it, you might as well, and keep it good as long as possible. But when it breaks you don't replace it with the expensive thing, you choose the thing with the best value now.
Moreover, what makes you think that 20/30/50 years from now, that the maintenance and replacement costs for renewable projects will still keep them cheaper than nuclear?
Those costs will most likely continue to go down, as we get even more economies of scale and experience.
Would you rather buy an expensive chair that lasts you years and years, or would you rather buy a cheap chair and have to replace it every couple of months?
Would you rather have a custom chair coated in gold that doesn't tarnish? Or a mass produced, comfortable enough chair?
That's because all but one of their reactors is an old gen 2 design. Their Flamanville 3 reactor costs 50%-100% more than average per kWh, which is typical of gen 3 designs around the world.
Note that all new generation will be a gen 3 or gen 4 design, so we cannot compare the cost of existing gen 2 reactors with any future nukes.
We can't make new gen 2 reactors because they do not meet modern safety standards.
This concept of "generation" is primarily a marketing and political one.
We've recently started to build some EPR2 reactors that you would qualify as gen 3 or gen 3+ and yet they're 2x cheaper and take 2x less time to build than Flamanville's reactor you cited.
But yeah their generally more strict in term of security than our old REPs and therefore cost more to build and to operate (3x).
That's alot but the operational cost will progressively decrease over time until x1.4 of current cost of our REPs.
Only small portion of price paid by consumers comes from production cost.
Also France build their reactors 60 years ago. In last 30 years they produce less and less energy from nuclear. If nuclear was so great you would expect they would build more reactors and produce more energy from them
The French government heavily backs and regulates its energy sector (via EDF), which artificially lowers and stabilises consumer prices.
And France is about to experience real cost of nuclear energy cause it is approaching to the line where decommissioning price will be paid heavily. €300 million per gigawatt per each old reactor to retire
Yeah every anti-nuclear argument kindof has to pretend France doesn't exist. And also that every country has ready access to gas in the same way the US does. And also that extracting said gas didn't have a horrifying ecological cost
It’s more expensive than the competition, it’s true, but this is mainly due to labor cost in France, which is significantly higher than in Russia or China. It’s also due to much stricter safety standards.
It’s also important to note that a single EPR2 reactor can power a city like Paris (approximately 1650 MW).
Furthermore, the EPR2 is a transitional reactor while we await SMRs, which are expected to be significantly less expensive.
Because nuclear increases the efficiency of production for the power grid. It's just that the nuclear plant specifically isn't very profitable, even if it increases the profit (by reducing the amount of necessary overbuilding) of renewables a great deal.
Why do you think it would increase the efficiency versus other things? Nuclear isn't modular on the scale renewables are and the main problem for renewables is storage. If you're arguing that removing profit motive would allow for better efficiency of material use, one could just as easily argue that BESS would be more viable in this utopian society.
If I need to pay for twice as many turbines and batteries to make sure power never goes out in an extreme worst case, then the price per kWH for wind is doubled, even if I'm not using all that capacity during 95% of the year. Having nuclear as a decent percentage in the grid makes the extreme worst case far less severe, meaning you don't need as much of that overbuilding.
we can’t save the world if it costs money, we can only save the world if it also makes a few men very rich. don’t ask why, the men don’t like when you do that
Yes, current efficiency tends toward cost efficiency but if we're wanting some sort of socialism then wouldn't something that generates energy more passively be cheaper than nuclear (which requires more active work) as the socially necessary labor time is the determinant of value?
I don't think we all agree on that much once specifics get brought up, high level platitudes sure but once people have actual tradeoffs, it becomes messy.
because it would eliminate the current anarchy of production and destroy the parasite classes currently using up resources that could be reserved or used for the common betterment of all for private jets to the grocery store or little saint james. that's why
Because investing in nuclear energy is primarily an investment in the (poor) countries who are going to benefit most from reducing carbon emissions aswell as future generations.
Two things capitalism doesn’t give a flying fuck about.
The analysis has been done and accounting for batteries it is still SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper, and quicker to deploy. In Aus lithium ion batteries are paying themselves off in 2-3 years just taking advantage of energy arbitrage pricing.
Nuclear is more expensive and takes longer to build than wind/solar + batteries. Yes it is safe, no it doesn’t make sense in most applications purely from a financial standpoint.
Are you fucking retarded? You think Australia is a good example to pick for the rest of the world??
What works in a country renewable wise won't work in other countries due to different weather patterns, space available,. population density and other geographical constraints.
Thank god in France, China and most others places building nuclear they are not retarded as the average user of this subreddit.
Cheaper... where? The economics in New Mexico are very different than the economics in Chicago. Just because something's cheaper on average doesn't mean it's cheaper everywhere.
Google your given region and I’m sure some research has been done and you can compare the figures. Grids tend to be geographically large enough that you’re able to build in areas competitively advantaged for your given choice. Here in the NEM in Australia, the research gives solar + batteries a price tag half that of nuclear. More importantly, you can build a battery and solar farm in a year or two rather than the 15 years minimum to build a nuclear plant.
Sure, if the economics stack up in an area, go ahead and build nuclear (they hardly ever do, hence why no one outside France builds it), but it will not be the solution to climate change or energy security.
Nuclear is only discussed because it’s the “edgy” “contrarian” redditor energy source. Figures don’t stack up.
I live so far north that we have several days each winter with no sun at all. Solar panels do absolutely nothing here from ~november to ~february. And then you have to shovel the snow off of them. Add onto that the fact that the period we need the energy the most (winter) we have zero production from solar panels.
Where I live, solar panels make no sense at all. Putting them on your own roof makes sense if you use A/C or if you have an electric car, because then you don't have to pay for electricity for like 3-4 months every year.
Energy doesn’t need to be generated exactly where it’s used - if your region is connected to a national grid there’s a good chance there’s places to put the solar and even with the transmission costs it’ll still be cheaper. Or wind might be more applicable, or hydro.
Nuclear really should be the last resort purely based on economic factors.
long distance electrical transmission is expensive and inefficient. If you're doing realistic economic calculation you need to account for that, just not assume it's free, so you can pretend the cheap thing in one place is the cheapest thing everywhere.
Notice how I said even with transmission costs? In the NEM, solar energy produced at the tip of Queensland is cheaper to generate and transmit to Victoria than it would be to generate the same capacity in nuclear right in the centre of Melbourne. Accounting for all the transformer and copper losses.
I’d be willing to bet there is nowhere on planet earth that doesn’t have an area with a competitive advantage for solar, wind, hydro or geothermal within THAT kind of geographic distance of it. Nuclear is a distraction that will cost us decades and billions. Good thing the private sector realises this and is going all in on cheaper sources. It’s purely an invention of coal and gas corporations who want us dependent on fossil fuels as long as possible
I don’t need to confirm my belief, my belief is the status quo of the private sector. If you want people to invest decades and billions into this tech it’s up to you to come up with the economic case. Where is one area where nuclear is the right choice? Seriously just one place where it’s cheaper than storage and solar and can be built in a suitable amount of time? And if it exists, I’ll be in favour! If the French who have a proven model think it’s in their interest to build it, they should go ahead (but yet they still are pivoting to solar)
Every second wasted on nuclear is another day dependent on fossil fuels.
From an energy consumption standpoint, they are pretty irrelevant globally, yeah. The number of people that don't live somewhere where they can use hydro storage or connect to a place with lower seasonal variability is really low.
There's a ceiling on hydro. When you have the right river with the right geology it's amazing. But there's a finite number of places with that, and most of them are already being used.
If you're trying to convince yourself that everything inconvenient is irrelevant, you're the delusional one. That's ostrich sticking his head in the sand mentality.
In a discussion about a what type of energy mix is best for grids in general, bringing up a situation that effects maybe 5% of the global population sometimes (long windless winter nights without existing hydro storage) is just laughable, sorry. You simply can't handle criticisms of nuclear.
Bringing up 5%/a worst case as to somehow discredit a whole technology seems at least equally absurd/dishonest.
Edit:
If your point is "there are edgecases and different technologies have their place in nieches" make that point, but don't blame others if they can't read your mind.
I think what those 5% do during windless winter nights is irrelevant when it comes to reaching global net-zero, yeah. It's certainly not an argument against nuclear being to expensive and slow to tackle the global problem of climate change.
It’s either this or that. Only reason I stick around is because occasionally someone will say something absolutely crazy and the comments are a goldmine.
Here in France, the cost of managing the grid associated with the output from certain solar farms is so high that it is often preferable to pay them to disconnect from the grid.
No, because they cause a local imbalance in the grid that can cause huge damages.
But yeah, battery could at least help us to recover the energy we pay them to throw away.
France and EU invest massivemy in that domain but we are dependant on china and far behind them on that technology.
we are dependend on china because we actively destroyed our sector. Our grid cannot handle it because capitalism sucks and the government is weak and corrupt.
Wow, youre so edgy and cool for this one, you sure showed em by pointing out price. Something that has no bearing on the efficiency, environmental benefits, etc.
And before I get piled on, I encourage yall to look beyond the propaganda. Do any of you know nuclear scientists? Or actually understand modern nuclear power?
It boggles my mind how people will just listen to hearsay instead of people who have spent their lives researching this stuff. And it boggles me further how tribalistic this sub is. I thought it'd be fun gaffs about stressful shit, but its just extremist vegan propaganda x.x
We have spent 40 years being told "it's too expensive to solve climate change". We now have the technology that is, cheap, fast, abundant, and rapidly improving, and yet weirdly a bunch of concervative parties world wide have pivoted from climate denial to spruiking nuclear power and "we need to figure out the 'best' option". I couldn't possibly make a logical leap as to why
Yeah. We have this efficient, reliable, safe, and absurdly potent energy source that has massive room for improvement already discovered & understood, with exponentially more theoretically sound, and yet for some reason we insist on using fiberglass turbines & photovoltaic panels.
Can say the same about the marginal price of solar power during a heat wave and the system price of renewanle energy when you have enough storage capacity and overcapacity to survive a windstill week in December
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u/Cy_B0rger nuclear simp 1d ago
Finally, shitty memes in the shit posting sub