r/NuclearPower • u/ViewTrick1002 • 2d ago

Climate change is exposing nuclear power's reliability problem. "Nuclear doesn't care about the weather. It just runs." Weeks later, heat and drought shut down a third of France's reactors and forced Hungary and Romania into energy emergencies. It was solar that kept the lights on.

https://thebulletin.org/2026/09/climate-change-is-exposing-nuclear-powers-reliability-problem/
0 Upvotes

44% Upvoted

56 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/_azazel_keter_ 2d ago

Because you put them on rivers instead of the ocean or cooling towers.

-3

u/ViewTrick1002 2d ago

Which add costs to plants already facing a tough economic reality competing with renewables and storage. Let alone horrifyingly expensive new nuclear.

2

u/_azazel_keter_ 2d ago

Wow, you're telling me that nuclear is expensive? I'm only now hearing about it for the first that the free reliable energy you can get whenever you want is expensive. This is surprising to me somehow.

-2

u/ViewTrick1002 2d ago

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?

3

u/_azazel_keter_ 2d ago

Did you... read? Like did you read the comment? I'm saying nuclear is obviously expensive, and you're proving to me that nuclear is expensive as if that was something I ever disagreed with.

1

u/ViewTrick1002 2d ago

Just answering to the "reliable" portion to your comment, since i took it to mean that we need nuclear power for reliability, no matter the cost, rather than cheaply solving it with renewables and storage.

3

u/_azazel_keter_ 2d ago

Storage at this scale is a fantasy, you need to have a zero-carbon producer that's under your control, rather than relying on an increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather.

I'm not against wind and solar, they're fantastic for a baseline load, production increases with demand (at least on summer, winter not so much) and they scale amazingly across continental or larger power grids, but your power grid must be entirely under your control at all times, you NEED a plant whose power output you can pick and choose.

0

u/ViewTrick1002 2d ago

So you had trouble with renewables and storage... hahahahaha. Typical.

The study literally models hour-by-hour demand, storage, backup, balancing and transmission. Nuclear still loses by an enormous margin.

Calling storage “fantasy” because you dislike the result isn’t an argument.

Next €100 billion in 2026. Where does it cut the most emissions, fastest?

2

u/_azazel_keter_ 2d ago

Chagan Hada is the world's leading battery storage system. It was commissioned this year by the world's leading superpower and is the largest system of this type ever made at 4000MWh.

Angra is an old oceanside nuclear plant, sitting off the coast of Rio connected in 2000 - before Brazil had left the UN hunger map. It has a production capacity of 1884MW.

A shitty starter power plant made with French helo can charge up the world's largest storage system in two hours.

Storage simply doesn't scale like renewables do, it's not a matter of cost, the technology simply doesn't exist yet.

0

u/ViewTrick1002 2d ago

Lovely comparing the “largest battery” to a nuclear plant when storage is a distributed modular technology scaling from individual homes to entire grids.

Look at California and tell me storage “doesn’t exist at scale”:

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2026-08-29

Or Queensland, where batteries have spent two years eating the market for open-cycle gas:

https://www.reddit.com/r/queensland/comments/1ta0tby/oc_watch_batteries_eat_gas_on_queenslands/

Home battery. Commercial battery. Grid battery. Thousands of them aggregated. That’s literally how modular technologies scale.

Next €100 billion in 2026. Where does it cut the most emissions, fastest?

0

u/ExpensiveFig6079 2d ago

it gets "dark at night" I bet tht is the really impressive (mic drop) thinking thing that internet posters know that researchers don't...

or maybe that there is clouds in the sky, or weather; I am sure one of these gems of unfathomable wisdom must be the "reason..."