That’s not an issue at all honestly. We need more nuclear power, it is clean power. Restarting existing reactors that weren’t decommissioned due to issues, is the fastest way to replace base load generation currently provided by things like coal and gas. Solar, wind, etc. are great but they don’t work 24/7/365, so there needs to be a base load to cover that. At the moment, that’s handled by coal and gas in most places.
Clean? It might not emit CO2, but there is still the nuclear waste.
And no, there is no solution to deal with all of it. If you disagree, my country hasn’t decided in decades where to put it and would like to offer it to you. No one has offered to take it yet.
Nuclear waste is a non issue, just dumpt it in deep old mines, in seismically stable places and then fill them in, the problem is politicians scared after watching chernobil in hbo.
That reactor is an OLD Babcock and Wilcox design that is at least two generations behind. The money and resources going into that pile of junk would be better spent on a new plant. Yes I’m well aware of the issues surrounding building new nuclear plants in the U.S. That’s a different conversation and not one I will enter into here. Sure in the short term, maybe even in the mid-term restarting that plant looks good on paper. However, that is still a reactor design that is over 60 years old and physically it is 50 years old. Not to mention the design has several documented short comings that require monitoring and processes that a new generation reactor would not need. Sure they’re not RBMK level of issues, but that reactor really should stay decommissioned.
It does not matter how many nuclear, solar, or wind plants that are built. The fact of the matter is that all of these resources, not just money, is being put into a technology, AI, that is of limited use at best at the present state of the technology.
With some light searching I found that the total amount of nuclear power capacity on Earth today adds up to 371.5 GW
Meanwhile, China built 315 GW of solar capacityin the last year. Solar panels don’t charge at night, obviously, which is why China is also installing base load in the form of grid-scale battery storage and already has 215 GWh online today with plans to surpass 721 GWh by 2027.
While we wait 10-15 years to build more nuclear power plants, China is just going to keep pumping out more and more solar panels and base-load battery stations faster and faster. I’m entirely soured on nuclear.
China also has over half of the world’s coal power generation. They are also still building more, just not as much as solar, but it’s still being added to. Coal power share in China fell in 2025 for the first time. But not because they reduced it, but it was the first time where they added enough solar/wind to outpace the adding of coal.
China also has quotas that require utility companies to buy a certain share of coal power. So you can’t get clean energy there by law, as individual or industrial user.
China also has the rare earths needed to produce batteries, from what I remember they sit on the largest reservers for them by quite a margin, but I don’t remember a source for that. So for them, adding battery based grid storage is easier than most of the world. Plus they are basically the only ones that even make any batteries anymore in the first place.
What this demonstrates is that China will use whatever the most efficient power generation is that gets electricity to the maximum number of people and industries for the lowest cost. They aren’t installing solar because they want to save the world, they’re doing it because it works. It’s better than anything else on the market and so they’re investing.
Notably, they are not installing nuclear power at the same rate. They plan to have 200 GW of nuclear capacity by 2035, but they’re installing more than that in solar capacity every year. That should tell you something.
The main issues with nuclear power are that it’s more expensive than renewables with battery storage, and that it’s very slow to build which makes it the go-to option for coal and gas supporters looking to delay the energy transition for a few more years and use up all the funding.
Hence why we’re talking about bringing existing reactors that have been shutdown back online
And that doesn’t even get into the newer reactor designs being worked on now. Light water modular reactors, thorium reactors, molten salt reactors, etc. that all can be built faster than the old designs currently in use.
The designs from the 60s and 70s are monolithic behemoths, but a lot of work has been done in recent decades on technologies that were essentially abandoned outside academia back then simply because they couldn’t be used to produce nuclear weapons.
Modern battery storage still cannot guarantee a base load capability 24/7 without massive battery farms multiple times the size of standard usage. What storage is great at is evening out supply to stabilize the grid. Renewables and battery storage will never be base load capable for any sizeable grid region, you simply need too much to handle the modern power requirements of a city, including necessary expansion in the future.
Some people just don’t want to accept that fact, so we sit here with thousands of gas and coal plants still burning every day instead of taking any steps in the right direction, wasting valuable time that we don’t have.
As it is, a coal plant produces more radioactive material than the waste from a nuclear power plant, but it’s allowed to be exhausted into the atmosphere and ignored. And that doesn’t even get into the greenhouse gasses. If these plants were required to actually clean their emissions, they wouldn’t be nearly as “cheap” to operate.
Continuing to operate nuclear plants that we’ve already paid for and are on the hook for decommissioning costs is perfectly sensible. Building new ones is what isn’t.
There’s lots of newer designs we could use, but they’re still not going to be economically viable. A new nuclear plant isn’t about today, it needs to be viable over its expected lifespan: around 2036 to 2076.
The fancy new designs aren’t up against today’s batteries. They’re up against 2040’s batteries, and they can’t compete. For the price of a new nuclear plant, we’ll be able to buy those massive battery farms and have money left over. Not today maybe, but a new reactor isn’t going to start feeding power into the grid for ten years or so, so it’ll need to compete with 2036’s battery prices on day one and it’s only going to get worse from there.
Hydroelectric is great… Apart from the existing entire ecosystem behind the dam that is destroyed to create the lake used to store the energy it then uses.
And that assumes a large enough body of water to pull energy from without depleting that source, especially with climate change shifting weather patterns. Many existing dams are operating at or near minimum levels because of ongoing drought conditions and similar issues.
In 2021, global installed hydropower electrical capacity reached almost 1,400 GW, the highest among all renewable energy technologies. source
If many are operating at minimum capacity, they’re still doing a lot. Not all hydroelectic are dammed type, tidal is picking up over time. However, I was merely refuting your not always on claim, not the rest of it. Nuclear is a good option too, when not operated by capitalists.
Everyone always brings up niche options that are highly dependent of the physical region like hydroelectric, tidal, thermal, etc. that massive portions of the country don’t have access to, as if they’re solutions to the base generation from coal and gas.
To be most effective hydro electric power dams are only opened when they have enough water in them to produce a hood amount of power.
You want as big of a fall height of the water as possible before going into the turbine.
Considering the large local environmental toll hydro electric power has, with disruptions to fish and other animals, it does make sense to keep it as efficient as possible.
Is efficiency really the reason behind dams being somewhat intermittent? Rather than just the fact that we might not need them on all the time (needs vary), or that we just can’t leave them on all the time (not enough water flowing in), and that yes, under these conditions, operators will direct power sources in the most efficient way possible.
What I mean is like, I get that leaving a dam off 50% of the time will have it generate more power once you turn it on. But over the whole period of time, assuming enough water upstream to replenish it in either case, is it actually going to generate more electricity than leaving it on 100% of the time?
I guess what I’m asking is, rather than them being more efficient, isn’t intermittent operation of dams due to the fact that we can’t just leave them on 100% in the first place?
The idiots are restarting Three Mile Island #1. All to power an AI data center.
Absolute insanity.
That’s not an issue at all honestly. We need more nuclear power, it is clean power. Restarting existing reactors that weren’t decommissioned due to issues, is the fastest way to replace base load generation currently provided by things like coal and gas. Solar, wind, etc. are great but they don’t work 24/7/365, so there needs to be a base load to cover that. At the moment, that’s handled by coal and gas in most places.
The issue is it being used for AI slop.
Nuclear Is Not The Solution
Clean? It might not emit CO2, but there is still the nuclear waste.
And no, there is no solution to deal with all of it. If you disagree, my country hasn’t decided in decades where to put it and would like to offer it to you. No one has offered to take it yet.
Nuclear waste is a non issue, just dumpt it in deep old mines, in seismically stable places and then fill them in, the problem is politicians scared after watching chernobil in hbo.
I completely disagree that it’s not an issue.
That reactor is an OLD Babcock and Wilcox design that is at least two generations behind. The money and resources going into that pile of junk would be better spent on a new plant. Yes I’m well aware of the issues surrounding building new nuclear plants in the U.S. That’s a different conversation and not one I will enter into here. Sure in the short term, maybe even in the mid-term restarting that plant looks good on paper. However, that is still a reactor design that is over 60 years old and physically it is 50 years old. Not to mention the design has several documented short comings that require monitoring and processes that a new generation reactor would not need. Sure they’re not RBMK level of issues, but that reactor really should stay decommissioned.
It does not matter how many nuclear, solar, or wind plants that are built. The fact of the matter is that all of these resources, not just money, is being put into a technology, AI, that is of limited use at best at the present state of the technology.
With some light searching I found that the total amount of nuclear power capacity on Earth today adds up to 371.5 GW
Meanwhile, China built 315 GW of solar capacity in the last year. Solar panels don’t charge at night, obviously, which is why China is also installing base load in the form of grid-scale battery storage and already has 215 GWh online today with plans to surpass 721 GWh by 2027.
While we wait 10-15 years to build more nuclear power plants, China is just going to keep pumping out more and more solar panels and base-load battery stations faster and faster. I’m entirely soured on nuclear.
China also has over half of the world’s coal power generation. They are also still building more, just not as much as solar, but it’s still being added to. Coal power share in China fell in 2025 for the first time. But not because they reduced it, but it was the first time where they added enough solar/wind to outpace the adding of coal.
China also has quotas that require utility companies to buy a certain share of coal power. So you can’t get clean energy there by law, as individual or industrial user.
China also has the rare earths needed to produce batteries, from what I remember they sit on the largest reservers for them by quite a margin, but I don’t remember a source for that. So for them, adding battery based grid storage is easier than most of the world. Plus they are basically the only ones that even make any batteries anymore in the first place.
Source for most of the info.
What this demonstrates is that China will use whatever the most efficient power generation is that gets electricity to the maximum number of people and industries for the lowest cost. They aren’t installing solar because they want to save the world, they’re doing it because it works. It’s better than anything else on the market and so they’re investing.
Notably, they are not installing nuclear power at the same rate. They plan to have 200 GW of nuclear capacity by 2035, but they’re installing more than that in solar capacity every year. That should tell you something.
The main issues with nuclear power are that it’s more expensive than renewables with battery storage, and that it’s very slow to build which makes it the go-to option for coal and gas supporters looking to delay the energy transition for a few more years and use up all the funding.
Hence why we’re talking about bringing existing reactors that have been shutdown back online And that doesn’t even get into the newer reactor designs being worked on now. Light water modular reactors, thorium reactors, molten salt reactors, etc. that all can be built faster than the old designs currently in use.
The designs from the 60s and 70s are monolithic behemoths, but a lot of work has been done in recent decades on technologies that were essentially abandoned outside academia back then simply because they couldn’t be used to produce nuclear weapons.
Modern battery storage still cannot guarantee a base load capability 24/7 without massive battery farms multiple times the size of standard usage. What storage is great at is evening out supply to stabilize the grid. Renewables and battery storage will never be base load capable for any sizeable grid region, you simply need too much to handle the modern power requirements of a city, including necessary expansion in the future.
Some people just don’t want to accept that fact, so we sit here with thousands of gas and coal plants still burning every day instead of taking any steps in the right direction, wasting valuable time that we don’t have.
As it is, a coal plant produces more radioactive material than the waste from a nuclear power plant, but it’s allowed to be exhausted into the atmosphere and ignored. And that doesn’t even get into the greenhouse gasses. If these plants were required to actually clean their emissions, they wouldn’t be nearly as “cheap” to operate.
Continuing to operate nuclear plants that we’ve already paid for and are on the hook for decommissioning costs is perfectly sensible. Building new ones is what isn’t.
There’s lots of newer designs we could use, but they’re still not going to be economically viable. A new nuclear plant isn’t about today, it needs to be viable over its expected lifespan: around 2036 to 2076.
The fancy new designs aren’t up against today’s batteries. They’re up against 2040’s batteries, and they can’t compete. For the price of a new nuclear plant, we’ll be able to buy those massive battery farms and have money left over. Not today maybe, but a new reactor isn’t going to start feeding power into the grid for ten years or so, so it’ll need to compete with 2036’s battery prices on day one and it’s only going to get worse from there.
Hydroeletric doesn’t work 24/7/365?
Hydroelectric is great… Apart from the existing entire ecosystem behind the dam that is destroyed to create the lake used to store the energy it then uses.
And that assumes a large enough body of water to pull energy from without depleting that source, especially with climate change shifting weather patterns. Many existing dams are operating at or near minimum levels because of ongoing drought conditions and similar issues.
If many are operating at minimum capacity, they’re still doing a lot. Not all hydroelectic are dammed type, tidal is picking up over time. However, I was merely refuting your not always on claim, not the rest of it. Nuclear is a good option too, when not operated by capitalists.
Everyone always brings up niche options that are highly dependent of the physical region like hydroelectric, tidal, thermal, etc. that massive portions of the country don’t have access to, as if they’re solutions to the base generation from coal and gas.
Coal usage increased by 1% in 2024, up to a total of 10,700 TWh of power globally.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/coal
Natural Gas produced 6,529 TWh as of 2022.
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/fossil-fuels/natural-gas#tracking
That’s the base generation that nuclear targets. 1,400GW (or 1.4TW) is a large number but with context, it’s a drop in the bucket.
different flow rates.
It’s better to use it as a backup to solar and wind. And if there’s enough excess in energy production, pump the water back to another dam.
Actually, no it doesn’t.
To be most effective hydro electric power dams are only opened when they have enough water in them to produce a hood amount of power.
You want as big of a fall height of the water as possible before going into the turbine.
Considering the large local environmental toll hydro electric power has, with disruptions to fish and other animals, it does make sense to keep it as efficient as possible.
Is efficiency really the reason behind dams being somewhat intermittent? Rather than just the fact that we might not need them on all the time (needs vary), or that we just can’t leave them on all the time (not enough water flowing in), and that yes, under these conditions, operators will direct power sources in the most efficient way possible.
What I mean is like, I get that leaving a dam off 50% of the time will have it generate more power once you turn it on. But over the whole period of time, assuming enough water upstream to replenish it in either case, is it actually going to generate more electricity than leaving it on 100% of the time?
I guess what I’m asking is, rather than them being more efficient, isn’t intermittent operation of dams due to the fact that we can’t just leave them on 100% in the first place?
If we left them on 24/7 they would quickly run out of water turn the turbine