The longer faux-environmentalists like Greenpeace continue to double-down on boneheaded anti-nuclear stances, the less respect I have for them, and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
awalsh128 · 1m ago
Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.
robotnikman · 13m ago
>and the more strongly I suspect them to be fossil fuel industry plants.
I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
No comments yet
ben_w · 5m ago
Greenpeace is both halves of the name.
While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.
This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.
Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
exabrial · 1m ago
> the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons
I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
SequoiaHope · 4m ago
Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects.
pydry · 6m ago
Poland is the dirtiest coal producer in Europe but a point in its favor (for some) was that it didnt prove conclusively that you could decarbonize your electric grid without any help at all from nuclear power.
So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.
We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 1m ago
You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.
Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control
epistasis · 10m ago
Which are the fake costs from regulation?
We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?
I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
carstenhag · 2m ago
I am pretty sure governments around the world want it to be cheaper, but at the same time know that it must be very strictly regulated. Even if that makes it pricier, one can't call that "fake costs".
Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
yellowapple · 6m ago
> I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California.
I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 0s ago
Yeah it seems like having State control is not a silver bullet
tietjens · 46m ago
Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.
kulahan · 32m ago
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
oceanplexian · 14m ago
It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.
pstuart · 9m ago
There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
toomuchtodo · 22m ago
You limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops.
Cool, your country fell way behind every other developed nation in this and you've missed out on a huge industry. In the end, your citizens will still use the products, they'll just probably end up having to pay more for the same functionality.
toomuchtodo · 17m ago
Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.
It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help.
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
bluefirebrand · 23m ago
It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
yellowapple · 17m ago
Not even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.
robotnikman · 10m ago
This right here. It's not one or the other, its a diverse combination of all of them that makes for the best results.
RandomLensman · 20m ago
Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
cyberax · 15m ago
Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
gsibble · 33m ago
That's a shame.
pkoiralap · 19m ago
Asking because I don't know. How is enrichment governed? Say for instance if a country is only using it for energy vs defense/offense. And are there elements that can be specifically used for energy vs otherwise? Last I remember, having access to enriched uranium was grounds for a country to bomb another one.
Polizeiposaune · 3m ago
Natural uranium on earth is currently about 0.7% U-235; civilian power reactors typically need low-enriched uranium which is 3% to 5% U-235.
The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).
Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
nradov · 14m ago
You should read the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as it addresses several of those issues. Possession of highly enriched uranium isn't necessarily an act of war by itself.
IAEA inspections verify your claimed inventory and enrichment facilities. They are trying to detect if any nuclear materials are being skimmed/diverted. As for weapons, nuclear fuel is very low enrichment (usually under 5%). Iran surpassed 60%, which has no peaceful use, so that is why it was said they were perusing weapons.
philipkglass · 11m ago
The only way to ensure that a civil uranium enrichment program remains strictly civil is via transparency and monitoring. A country that has mastered uranium enrichment technology for fueling civil power reactors could use the same technology to produce bomb-grade uranium. It actually takes more work to enrich natural uranium into fuel for power reactors than it takes to further enrich power reactor fuel into bomb material:
Energy needs like 5% enrichment while weaponizing needs much higher and much more difficult to obtain 85% enrichment
medlazik · 8m ago
Uranium mining isn't clean at all. Between Greenpeace (full of business school hacks) and lobby pressured EU courts, there's a middle ground.
anthk · 18m ago
Well, compared to carbon, it is.
gsibble · 33m ago
It is. And that's great news!
cramcgrab · 34m ago
The waste is something tho
kulahan · 34m ago
It's not. Not only is it a completely negligible amount (~one 50-gallon barrel per reactor per year), it's easy to store (literally kitty litter) and can be re-enriched (renewable).
daemonologist · 1m ago
Okay, not all of this is accurate. I am not against nuclear (although in recent years it has not been very cost effective), but here are some figures with citations:
- Storing it is easy in the short term, but unfortunately any leaks are a big deal and you have to store it basically forever, which is a challenge. If Yucca Mountain were to be restarted it's estimated storing existing and new waste through 2031 there would cost in the neighborhood of $100 billion : (warning: large PDF) https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf
Also you are forced to deal with it one way or another, instead of just dumping it in the atmosphere and washing your hands of it.
blueflow · 18m ago
> it's easy to store (literally kitty litter)
I showed your comment to someone who is currently writing their PhD on how to store nuclear waste safely. I barely understood half of what they said in the following rant, but they referenced the situation of the Sellafield site several times.
vslira · 12m ago
I swear I'm not trolling: do you mind asking them about simply dumping it (in leaded concrete barrels etc) in the deep ocean?
I read it 14 years ago or so, after the Fukushima accident. I don't think the science has changed since then, or since the 90s when this project was shut down. There continue to be so much money in coal, gas, and oil and it's from there I think most of the opposition to nuclear stems from.
Now they just need to rule that water is wet and grass is green. Where did we, as a civilization, go wrong where now a court is needed to state a fact?
binaryturtle · 22m ago
This is clean, until something goes catastrophically wrong.
(Which eventually it will. The more reactors, the more chances for it to happen.)
yellowapple · 13m ago
Even accounting for the times things have gone “catastrophically wrong”, nuclear is many orders of magnitude safer per unit of energy than every other energy source except solar.
Sure, in deaths per unit energy. But the real risk of nuclear is financial. The tail risk is huge for any producer on their own, which makes insurance extremely expensive, and which means that usually only nations bear the full financial risk of nuclear.
mgaunard · 17m ago
Meanwhile lignite mines (which Germany are re-opening) actively affect the health of everyone nearby, even when everything goes perfectly alright.
pydry · 10m ago
The nuclear industry did say that this would happen but the reality was the exact opposite:
>According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.
Pebble-bed reactors are incapable of catastrophic failure, and molten-salt reactors have negative feedback loops with increasing pressure. Nuclear doesn't have to mean the same designs that were used in the 60s.
pelagicAustral · 18m ago
I'd say a reactor in inland Europe is far from the craziest place to put one. God forbid someone were to put one in the Pacific ring of fire... oh, wait...
I feel the same way as well. It would make sense for an oil rich country that feels threatened by people not buying oil (or gas) to subvert a movement like greenpeace.
No comments yet
While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons.
This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants.
Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.
I'm unaware of this to be true. Civilian reactors are hardly-at-all-enirched uranium reactors. Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes.
So, it didnt attract any hate or shaming from the nuclear industry's faux - environmentalist public relations arm. Unlike Germany, whom they really hate and for whom the FUD and lies was nearly constant.
(E.g. https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/german-nucle... remember when the nuclear industry-promised blackouts finally materialized? I dont).
Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control
We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there?
I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.
If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. Otherwise it seems like we are wasting efforts in optimizing the wrong thing for nuclear.
Also, it takes decades to build them, very often then also getting delayed. Why even consider it nowadays?
I grew up a few miles away from SMUD's Rancho Seco nuclear power plant; I maintain that shutting it down was SMUD's worst decision. There were problems motivating that shutdown, yes, but nothing that couldn't have been solved.
Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 - September 2025
US Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).
Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr...
https://scipython.com/blog/uranium-enrichment-and-the-separa...
- The U.S. generates about 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel each year (from 94 reactors/97 GW) : https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... . For the whole world it's 7,000 tons (375-400 GW) : https://www.iaea.org/publications/14739/status-and-trends-in...
- Storing it is easy in the short term, but unfortunately any leaks are a big deal and you have to store it basically forever, which is a challenge. If Yucca Mountain were to be restarted it's estimated storing existing and new waste through 2031 there would cost in the neighborhood of $100 billion : (warning: large PDF) https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf
- It's possible to recycle the fuel, but currently an order of magnitude more expensive than digging up more : https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/economics-reprocess...
I showed your comment to someone who is currently writing their PhD on how to store nuclear waste safely. I barely understood half of what they said in the following rant, but they referenced the situation of the Sellafield site several times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_... makes it seem not such a big deal
It's available online also: https://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/PlentifulEnergy.pdf
I read it 14 years ago or so, after the Fukushima accident. I don't think the science has changed since then, or since the 90s when this project was shut down. There continue to be so much money in coal, gas, and oil and it's from there I think most of the opposition to nuclear stems from.
Apart from fast reactors, there's also the traditional reactors and storage of spent fuel. Finland's close to opening their process facility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
(Which eventually it will. The more reactors, the more chances for it to happen.)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
>According to research institute Fraunhofer’s Energy Charts, the plant had a utilisation ratio of only 24% in 2024, half as much as ten years before, BR said. Also, the decommissioning of the nearby Isar 2 nuclear plant did not change the shrinking need for the coal plant, even though Bavaria’s government had repeatedly warned that implementing the nuclear phase-out as planned could make the use of more fossil power production capacity necessary.
https://theprogressplaybook.com/2025/02/19/german-state-of-b...