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.
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.
Switzerland is not in the EU.
While it's not part of the EU as a member, Switzerland is quite literally in the EU.
Just the opposite. It's literally not in the EU. It's literally in Europe but not in the EU.
OP was making a geometric observation.
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
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.
Switzerland is not part of the European economic area, aka EEA.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
I agree, I also believe the overall startup cost and low ROI is more relevant than the occasional tree-hugger’s limited political influence.
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.
> Nuclear has never been financially viable
We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.
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...
> 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...
I mostly agree with your larger point, but the anti-nuclear movement predates the 70s by quite a bit.
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?
> 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
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.
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...
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.
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.
China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no such thing as cheap nuclear reactor. Even cheaper Chernobyl type is expensive to build.
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.
I really hope Swiss people learned a lesson from Germany and vote to build nuclear power plant. We need more investment in build and research on how to build safe, efficient power plants and ways of re-using spent nuclear fuel
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.
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".
I didn't think about seasonality of hydro power. You might want french design then, they are the most effective as starting/shutting down.
If there is any country that can safely build nuclear power plants, it is Switzerland.
Unless you drill holes into the outer containment hull.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
You could build the reactors inside the mountains to improve the security and effects of things like meltdowns.
Funny thing you mention that.
We had a nuclear meltdown in an experimental reactor in Lucens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor).
It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.
"All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear"
This is like firefighters opposing using water.