The problem with EU and nuclear is of scale, nimby and bureaucracy. If we unify and simplify the certification process, and we build lot of reactors at the same time like France did in the 70s and 80s, then cost will go down significantly, on the same level as Korea, China and Japan.

Nuclear fuel can be recycled, we need to build an EU nuclear industry with that in mind. Uranium is cheap and potentially infinite if we get it from the ocean. Ukraine has uranium deposits. Canada is also a reliable partner.

10-30 year lead time

I mean, it does not need to be 10-30 years. UAE deployment was from nothing (literally nothing), to first reactor connected in 12 years. The first first years were just for regulation and selecting a partner. Construction took 8 years. The median time for reactor deploy in Japan, Korea and China is 52 months, 65 months, and 68 months respectively, with China getting faster and faster. US and UK are the odd one out, with some deploy taking 513 month and 282 month respectively.

If the EU reform nuclear regulation on the continent and promote nuclear deployment in Italy, Poland, and Germany that would help a lot. The US needs to undergone a similar transformation.

I never said cost is comparable. It is not, in Europe more so than other countries. Nonetheless you are not paying the cost of the nuclear power plant, you are paying the price of electricity. And nuclear lower the price of electricity (see Finland) reason why petrol state like UAE, or china built nuclear power plant. The cost of nuclear in china is competitive with renewable. China is building 28 new reactors, with 59 already built (average construction time of 6 years and 3 billions dollars each). Not every country can build a nuclear power plant: your grid need to support the massive amount of energy produced by a nuclear power plant, your country need to support the massive upfront cost to build one, your country need to be stable, reliable and not encounter opposition from international organizations as nuclear power plant could be used to produce nuclear weapons, and finally you need to have domestic support for nuclear energy and political commitment across the political spectrum for years to make the necessary regulatory commitment.This makes it very hard to have the condition to build one. Furthermore you have a real advantage if you have the domestic know how in your country, and most simply do not have that.

The need for power maybe (not counting on that given the greater need caused by AI and the rapid industrialization of Asia and Africa), but the need for electricity will certainly not go down. While an electric car is more efficient, no electricity was used before to power the cars is going to replace.

Because the need for electricity will only grow the more electrification we do, and doing both is better then doing just one of the two. We need to max-out out production capacity for solar, wind and batteries anyway (and by production I mean combination of grid capacity and rate of expansion, material mining and refinement, labor, legislative bottleneck and capital availability). Anything more is definitionally better, and nuclear is a lot of way complementary with solar, wind, and batteries in materials, fuel, grid usage and operational constraint (namely it is dispatchable and can do load following).

True, but with known reserves and no material recycling we have 70 years of material at current rate. If we add undiscovered deposits we have more or less 200 years. If we add ocean deposits we have 60000 years. If we reprocess the uranium in breeder reactors (we have them already built in Russia, China, India) we can potentially arrive at 5 millions year of reserves. Given we are already discussing thorium rectors, this time frame makes uranium not a problem really.

If we can do both we should do both. This is not nuclear vs renewable. They solve different problems. Modern nuclear reactor design like Terrapower are created to work with renewable (using molten salt energy storage). Humanity will not reduce the amount of energy it uses, and we need to force the electrification transition if we do not want to destroy our planet.

Yes, the barrier for nuclear is much much much higher then renewable development. We know that the same nuclear reactor costs 3.5 billion in china, 4.5 billion in japan, and 9 billion in Europe. That is a huge difference. This is not just a technology problem, but an issue about regulation and processes. I am not arguing for going back to the regulatory framework before Chernobyl and Fukushima, but to take some lessons from the world of aviation where safety is important, but outcome driven and pragmatic regarding costs.

If we want SNR to succeed we need to make it so that you certify one reactor out of the factory line and then you can build a hundred more without to having to re-certify every single reactor.

Battery can meet the equivalent baseload. The problem is production capacity, cost, connections and the pollution caused by this deployment. Often is simply better to deploy more renewable than needed. Today you need curtailment to manage grid stability, the higher the percentage of nuclear is the higher the dependency on battery and curtailment is raising the cost of renewable.

The main problem is that in europe there is no single regulatory body for the certification of nuclear reactor. That means that a nuclear reactor certified for france needs to be certified again for UK, Poland or Czechia. The requirements for nuclear are much higher then a solar power plant. Each single material and part needs to be certified and the entire production is tracked (material traceability, QA testing, chain of custody). A valve in a nuclear power plant cost 100 times more then the same valve in a coal plant. There are very few companies that deal with this level of paperwork required, this means often you need to create new production lines. Regulation in nuclear is not outcome oriented, but process oriented. So you do not have incentive to make everything more efficient: you do not care about the end result, you care about every single steps in the process. This make everything much longer and expensive. Post Fukushima raised a lot the cost of all design made before as new requirements caused to modify previous plants. This is one of the main reasons for the delay in nuclear deploy in the last 20 years.

cheap uranium can be bought from Canada and Kazakhstan. In Europe there are big reserves in Ukraine. But uranium can also be extracted from water. Getting uranium from the ocean is 3 to 5 times more expensive. But uranium is a minimal part of the cost of nuclear energy. So if we get uranium from the ocean, energy price will raise by 10% to 15%. On fossil fuel power plant the actual fuel is most of the cost of the energy. Furthermore you can buy uranium years in advance, making it much easier to prevent jump in market prices.

In the current European legislative environment yes. We lack common certification rules, standardized procurement and security standards that make sense. Nuclear in Europe is double the time to build and double the cost of nuclear in Japan. This was not always the case. France was able to decarbonized faster than any other big country in the world thanks to the rapid deployment of his fleet. If we fix that, new nuclear in Europe makes sense. We currently lack the technology and the industrial capacity to not be dependent on China for solar, wind and batteries. Nuclear provide energy when you need it, stabilize the grid and ultimately reduce the price of energy (like you see in Finland). The higher the share of renewable in the European grid, the higher the amount of batteries needed. In general one could argue that the best grid mix for lowering external dependencies and costs is 10% to 20% nuclear, and the rest hydro, solar, wind and batteries. In the north of Europe wind is a great resource, but in the most industrialized part of the south (Italian padana plain) the wind potential is very low, as the solar potential in winter when the fog would cover everything. The amount of connections to make a renewable only grid work on the European level are not trivial nor cheap, and we should do anything we can to promote and regulatory environment where the best tool for the job can be deployed.

Was referring no to this recent article cited in the cross posted thread: https://feddit.org/post/27922091

People do not want to ear this, but depending on your definition of clean, nuclear is as clean as solar, wind and batteries. No source of energy is free from death, carbon emissions and pollution. Solar, wind and batteries requires extensive mining for rare materials and carbon intensive factory production. If we check all factors again nuclear, the number are remarkably similar to solar, wind and batteries.

In a world where gas, oil and coal exists, nuclear must be put on the same category as renewable. We cannot afford to close any nuclear power plant, as closing a nuclear power plant before the last coal power plant is closed, means we are killing people. Numbers do not lie.

No, Poland is not a vassal. Hungary demonstrates it is quite possible to have a foreign policy that is literally hostile and still being part of the Union. At any time any country can leave the Union as UK demonstrated. So all member in the EU wants to be part of the union, they are not vassal. Poles do not want a communist government influenced by Russia. This is a fact. As of 2022, 97% of poles view Russia unfavorably and 89% view EU favorably. You cannot be more clear than that.

No, not propaganda, it is reality with data, and totally inconsequential to the discussion. Industrial growth is a small part of all the factor involved in quality of life, and while Soviet growth in the 60s and 70s was real, that stopped in the 80s and 90s causing the fall of the Soviet Union. The same industrial growth was common in all European countries post WW2.

What you should care is the vast majority of poles agree that joining the EU was one of the success stories of the century for Poland, with 70% to 85% saying that life is better under the EU. Poles are some of the most pro EU countries in Europe. The amount of independent pools on this is staggering. You need to be really dumb to not see this. And yes, some people have communist nostalgia, but the vast majority agree that was a dark age for Poland.

If you deny life in Poland is much better on all useful metrics now that Poland is sovereign and allied with european nations in the EU than before as dominion of the Soviet Union then your brain is rotted and I pity you.

You define imperialism as military conquest alone

Not true. I will use wikipedia definition: “Imperialism is the maintaining and extending of power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power (military and economic power) and soft power (diplomatic power and cultural imperialism).”

This perfectly matches both the behaviour of the US and the behaviour of Russia. This does not matches every war in history. It was coined in the 19th century to describe Napoleon III’s attempts to gain political support by invasion.

You claim the Ukrainian people support their current government. Under martial law, with opposition parties banned, media consolidated, dissent criminalized, what does that support actually measure? Polls in a war zone with no free press are not evidence. They are propaganda tools.

You are getting confused with Russia. Free press is allowed in Ukraine. According to Reporters without Borders, Ukraine ranked 62nd out of 180 countries, one of the strongest performance since it’s independence.

Russia has offered terms: neutrality, demilitarization, recognition of Crimea, self-determination for the Donbas.

You are forgetting also all territories currently occupied, the entirety of of Donbas and Luhansk they do not control. Neutrality and demilitarization with an imperialistic power at the border that has attached and conquered their neighbor since it was born as country means letting the door open for further conquest down the line. With no guarantee this is surrender. Russia is not willing to give anything for peace.

You ignored the core of my last message

Because it is irrelevant and a waste of time. US meddle with external country as it is an imperialistic nation. Russia meddle with external countries as it is an imperialistic nation. So what is there to discuss? Who does it more globally? The answer is the US. Who does it more in Ukraine? The answer is Russia. Now that we have this out of the way let’s focus on the core of my first message.

The position that serves Ukrainian workers is peace, sovereignty, and the right to determine their own future.

And the only way we saw this can be achieved for countries that border Russia is join the EU or NATO. Poland is now free, Czechia is now free, Romania is now free, Slovakia is now free, the Baltic states are now free, Hungary is now free (but we need to wait for next election to know if this will remain true).

Expansions with military conquest is imperialism. Imperialism may use economic coercion but it is not required. Ukrainian people support their current government. Russia does not want to negotiate anything short of full surrender. There is nothing else to add

We are not discussing US vs Russia. We are discussing Ukraine vs Russia. I do not care if Russia is worse or US is worse. Both are terrible, and Ukraine deserves to be his own country. Removing Ukraine from euromaidan and pretend it is a US coup is ridiculous.

Both Russia and US are imperialistic nations. So in Russia (the imperialistic invader) vs Ukraine (the victim of invasion), we must stand with Ukraine.

2.2% of Fukushima prefecture is nothing compared with the damage that fossil fuel is doing every single year to the entire planet. Even ignoring climate change, we are breathing pollution that is killing us. Radiation is a natural thing all around us, and our body evolved to correct for that below a certain threshold. Closing nuclear in germany before closing carbon killed a lot of people. If nuclear displace carbon I am more then happy with nuclear