jokteuran hour ago
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.
bilekas7 minutes ago
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.
esarbe2 minutes ago
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...
Gud3 minutes ago
Switzerland is not in the EU.
softfalcon27 minutes ago
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".
orwinan hour ago
I didn't think about seasonality of hydro power. You might want french design then, they are the most effective as starting/shutting down.
alephnerdan hour ago
> 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.
jokteuran hour ago
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.
folkrav16 minutes ago
> 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.
seviu10 minutes ago
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.
tonfaan hour ago
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.
alephnerdan hour ago
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)
shermantanktopan hour ago
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).
jokteuran hour ago
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.
Arodexan hour ago
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.
redsocksfan45an hour ago
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christkvan hour ago
You could build the reactors inside the mountains to improve the security and effects of things like meltdowns.
jokteuran hour ago
Funny thing you mention that.
We had a nuclear meltdown in an experimental reactor in Lucens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor).
IsToman hour ago
It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.
GL262 hours ago
Nuclear energy is really the energy of the future, fission still has bright days ahead of it. the startup market for SMRs is going to boom once the core challenges will have been solved, sure that we will see many ETH founders go into that world
Arodexan hour ago
Every SMR startup is failing. The more they progress, the more they revise their costs upwards.
SMR make as much sense as space datacenters. You can gaslight investors, you can gaslight HN, you can gaslight a national parliament full of lobbyists, but you can't gaslight thermodynamics.
mpweiheran hour ago
> Every SMR startup is failing.
Arodex43 minutes ago
Have you read the comments?
john_strinlaian hour ago
>SMR make as much sense as space datacenters.
you are in this thread a lot, so i am guessing you must be very familiar with the industry. maybe you can help me understand:
is the wikipedia on SMRs incorrect/lying when they say that there are commercially operating SMRs since 2020?
and how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
Arodexan hour ago
>commercially operating
And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money.
>how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics?
Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
Or solar.
And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
Nuclear attracts clever people, but it isn't smart nor wise.
vablingsan hour ago
I think you have a misunderstanding of what a SMR is supposed to be.
Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to deploy and cost will be significantly reduced.
We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs and have been for a very long time. Off the top of my head ship power has been exported to local areas for disaster relief
Solar is absolutely fantastic and your average person should not be hawking at solar for your home to offset your power bill. The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.
I don't think the likes of Westinghouse, Siemens, Rolls Royce and GE are duped. They are trying to solve a very hard problem!
Arodex40 minutes ago
>The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night.
Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have?
For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop?
john_strinlai44 minutes ago
>Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics.
true, you said "gaslight thermodynamics", which i have no idea what that means, so i took a guess at what you were implying.
>never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors.
is efficiency really the only metric to be considered? i feel like available space, availability of alternatives, time to complete construction, etc. are worthwhile to consider.
>And how long have you been out there? Have you never seen investors dumping and wasting billions in dead-ends? Never seen a mania before?
considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments worldwide considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania. but i am not an expert. you are talking like you are one, which is why i am asking questions.
Arodex36 minutes ago
>i feel like available space, time to complete construction
All of these favor again bigger reactors.
>considering the length of time and sheer number of people, companies, and governments considering/investing in SMR tech it seems unlikely to be a mania.
All of the Swiss energy companies are asking to be bailed out in advance of the investment in nuclear.
john_strinlai35 minutes ago
>All of these favor again bigger reactors.
how does having less available space favor a bigger reactor?
and how is constructing a bigger reactor faster than constructing a smaller one?
bryanlarsen16 minutes ago
There are two ways of achieving economies of scale: making things bigger or making more of them.
For small quantities, the former is usually more effective -- making things bigger lets you make fewer of them, reducing costs.
For large quantities, a factory can enable insane economies of scale.
SMR proponents are talking about building dozens of reactors. That fits very firmly in the "small quantity" column where economies of scale almost always favor building things bigger.
cauch24 minutes ago
Just a guess (I'm not the previous user), but I guess you need to look at the space _per GWh_?
If a big nuclear reactor takes 10x more space but has 20x more capacity, then it means not having much space favors the big nuclear reactor rather than building 10 small ones that will take twice more space.
(and same for the time)
john_strinlai21 minutes ago
its probably my fault for not making myself clear. i mean when the available space is constrained to a specific amount of space that cannot be exceeded.
just picking random numbers:
i have 1 square mile available. a big reactor takes 4 square miles. i cannot fit a big reactor, despite the bigger reactor being more efficient.
Arodex20 minutes ago
If you need 500 MW, you build one 500 MW reactor, not five 100 MW reactors. They will take more space.
As for speed, a 100 MW reactor is not commissioned in 1/5 of the time a 500 MW reactor is.
jkmanan hour ago
>'taylor-made' Says it all, doesn't it
bakiesan hour ago
What are the challenges they face?
Manuel_D6 minutes ago
One is regulatory. At least in the US, every nuclear reactor that produces at least 100 MW needs to carry a 375 million dollar insurance policy at minimum. Under 100 MW there is an alternate schedule that ranges from 5 million to 75 million scaling based on output. But the net result is that it's still more profitable to built a single large reactor, since a 1 GW reactor is less to insure than 10 100 MW reactors. This is written into law, it would require Congress to change it.
Second is that nuclear reactor efficiency tends to improve with size. The ratio of thermal watts to electric watts tends to be better with large reactors. I'm not super well versed on the engineering tradeoffs here by my rough understanding is that waste heat scales with surface area while useful energy extraction scales with volume.
redsocksfan45an hour ago
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2muchcoffeemanan hour ago
Doesn’t China have SMRs?
RealityVoidan hour ago
How are SMR's "gaslighting themodynamics"? I mean, sure, I can accept that they're not economical with current tech, but it's not a frigging' perpetuum mobile, it's feasible technology.
Arodexan hour ago
Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical. A bigger nuclear reactor will always undercut your price per watt.
chickenbig27 minutes ago
> Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical.
And the link between thermodynamics and the price of electricity is what?
Arodex13 minutes ago
Your small nuclear reactor is going to need almost as much engineering , plumbing, safety mechanism, personnel, maintenance, etc... as your big nuclear reactor.
holodukean hour ago
The mindset that makes people stuck in time. Sorry but SMRs are potentially very cheap. Not at this point. ,but when operated on scale they will be. You need to start
lightedman42 minutes ago
"SMR make as much sense as space datacenters."
So a whole lot of sense given the entire US Navy uses them and I already have one datacenter operating up in space (small test unit that over 3 months has provided ZERO issues) and a bigger one heading up into orbit next year when it's done being made.
"but you can't gaslight thermodynamics"
No but you can certainly conflate them like you're doing right now.
Arodex10 minutes ago
>the entire US Navy uses them
Is the business of the US Navy to sell electrity on the market?
You are the one conflating things that have absolutely no connections.
RealityVoid25 minutes ago
Ok, this is interesting. I am skeptic about DC's in space, but I do appreciate people actually doing stuff. What is it computing up there. How did you get it up? How does one usually talk with their satellite. I guess you don't merely have a dish since it's probably not geostationary.
bryanlarsen2 hours ago
It's a world-wide competition to generate the most expensive electricity! The record is currently held by Vogtle in Georgia US, but Ontario Canada is trying to take the crown by spending $500B on nuclear.
anon7725an hour ago
Is there a cleaner, more consistent technology for baseload?
At a certain point, dollars are funny money if you are destroying the environment to save a few now by generating baseload with a carbon-producing tech.
Of course, let’s build the safest and most efficient nuclear that we can, but “its capex is too high” is not a compelling argument to me.
And to be clear: renewables should form as much of the capacity as possible, but a reliable baseload is obviously still needed.
bryanlarsenan hour ago
"Baseload" is load, not generation. It's not necessary -- for example the small northern grids that only have diesel generators operate fine even though they have no generators that don't have the capacity for quick cycling.
Baseload was a cost optimization. Back in the day it was cheaper to build coal & nuclear plants that took days to power on. Somebody figured out that if a grid was built of a mix of those cheaper plants and more expensive plants that could start up quicker, it would lower costs. The typical grid was baseload coal and gas peakers. But ~20 years ago gas peakers became cheaper than baseload coal and any need or desire for baseload generation went away.
China is building a lot of coal plants to complement their solar buildout. Notably these are not base load plants. Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night.
Similarly, many new nuclear plant designs are not base load designs; they are designs that can be safely and quickly turned on and off.
P.S. the correct term for generation is "non-dispatchable", not "baseload"
tcfhgjan hour ago
we don't need reliable "base load" but peakers - with more renewables more than ever.
Baseload won't be price competitive with renewables in average or shiny/windy conditions ever
well_ackshually19 minutes ago
you'll be so happy about being price competitive when the conditions are bad for like a week and the country just doesn't run (or rely on other countries price gouging you for what your country needs to exist.)
Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible hand of the market hoping that price competitiveness means that it works well. Lives are at play.
Tepix7 minutes ago
No. Nuclear is neither price competitive, nor is it available quick enough.
Go fully renewable. Add batteries, like Google is doing. Just one example: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/24/google-to-deploy-worl...
mpweiheran hour ago
That competition is handily won by wind and solar.
In the meantime in Switzerland:
"Our cheapest electricity product is nuclear electricity."
reddalo2 hours ago
I wish Italy did the same.
We still have to deal with the consequences of a referendum hold not so long after che Chernobyl accident which made it illegal to build and operate nuclear power plants.
mpweiheran hour ago
> I wish Italy did the same.
They are in the process. Last I checked the bill to do so had passed the lower house and how needs to get ratified by the senate.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/italian-bill-on-...
Arodex2 hours ago
It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries. You even have the industrial prowess to make it all in the country step by step, whereas nuclear reactors are such humongous engineering projects that building the capacity is very out of reach.
Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how are you going to cool down your reactors? Nuclear in Italy is a non-starter.
flextheruleran hour ago
Solar, wind, and even hydroelectricity are too dependent upon the environment to make up the entire electricity generation capacity of any major industrial country. With renewables, even with batteries, the actual production is within a range. Couple that with demand also being in a range you get uncomfortable possibilities at play. And while colder water is definitely preferable for cooling, I'd have to imagine that if the bodies of water were actually becoming too hot to cool a nuclear reactor system there'd be bigger problems than energy production.
Kipters39 minutes ago
Why not both?
We still need rotating mass to keep the grid stable, which means either building giant flywheels, keep burning gas or bring nuclear into the mix.
One of these can also produce a ton of energy when needed, the other two cant.
We can and should build more renewables, but we can't risk grid stability!
iknowstuff22 minutes ago
We actually don’t need those anymore. Grid forming inverters and batteries will take over that role.
ziotom78an hour ago
> It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries
Do you have any trustable source for this?
swiftcoderan hour ago
I'd say "Supplementary Information for Strategic deployment of solar photovoltaics for achieving self-sufficiency in Europe throughout the energy transition"[1] fits the bill. It lays out various paths to 100% renewables (which in Italy, like in Spain, is heavily solar) by 20250
Arodexan hour ago
Just look at any map of solar power potential, solar irradiance, hours of sunshine of Europe.
otikikan hour ago
I think the question is more about the "and batteries" part than about the sunshine part.
ziotom7838 minutes ago
Exactly
dieortinan hour ago
Latitude?
stefantalpalaruan hour ago
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Kon5olean hour ago
Citizens should take note that no nuclear plants are ever built without many billions in state loans and guarantees.
It's not a cheap source of electricity, it's a way for someone to get money from taxpayers to subsidize their business.
cloudie7834 minutes ago
You should take note that you’re uninformed or intentionally spreading false information and misrepresenting reality.
Fact of the matter is it takes a large upfront investment to build a nuclear reactor and it has a longer time horizon before it becomes profitable in comparison to something like a gas or coal power plant.
It comes down to whether or not the country, government, citizens and country have the ability to think beyond a 4 year horizon or not.
dukoid23 minutes ago
Show us just a single NPP that is properly insured
eightysixfouran hour ago
Energy security is something I expect the government to invest my tax dollars in especially energy generation that is resilient to international politics and reduced carbon emissions.
Arodexan hour ago
Then nuclear isn't it.
Switzerland has no uranium and no strong relationship with an uranium-producing country. They also regularly antagonise the EU (especially the far-right isolationisz SVP/UDC, which is... pro-nuclear, of course) which controls every way fission products could be brought inside Switzerland.
The same far-right country is also the one who wanted to cap the population because "there isn't room anymore", but I guess there is now room for massive nuclear plants and the storage of fuel and spent fuel shrugs
Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
suddenlybananas39 minutes ago
>Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes.
What on earth are you talking about?
Arodex25 minutes ago
Slight hyperbole, but nuclear reactors in Switzerland and France shut down more and more often because the water needed to cool them down is already too hot:
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-adaptation/beznau-nucle...
It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers.
hereme88840 minutes ago
The estimated levelized cost of electricity changes dramatically with financing cost: from roughly the low-$100s/MWh under cheap capital to well above $200/MWh under high capital-cost assumptions. But wasn't that the case for wind and solar too?
functionmousean hour ago
Is that meaningfully different than modern coal and natural gas plants?
kdheiwnsan hour ago
That's what infrastructure is, yes.
paytonjjonesan hour ago
Por que no los dos?
testing2232140 minutes ago
Also absolutely minimum of 20 years to build it.
So this is fixing nothing short term.
doublepg23an hour ago
..as opposed to other green energy programs that received no government investment?
...or the externality-free fossil fuel industry?
orwin2 hours ago
Switzerland, Norway and Austria are probably the country that needs nuclear the less, but anything to start the discussion in other European countries is good.
Probably not economically viable in Switzerland though.
_diyar2 hours ago
Hard disagree. As a. swiss voter, this is close to my heart.
50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission.
Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise.
To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potential losses of hydro power as glaciers melt, nuclear + solar is the only real path for switzerland.
pmontra18 minutes ago
As you are Swiss, where would you get the uranium from? I expect that the Swiss Alps have some mine, especially in the south west (I didn't check) but is that enough? You might end up swapping a dependency from foreign providers of oil and gas with a dependency from foreign providers of uranium.
cogman10an hour ago
Why hasn't Switzerland deployed solar/wind? That seems like a pretty big miss in general. The Swiss grid has almost no wind which is strange for such a mountainous nation. And solar is also quite low which is also strange given how much empty land exists in Switzerland along with it's relatively low latitude.
Plankaluel44 minutes ago
Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol:
The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.
People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.
Arodexan hour ago
See this long-form investigation:
https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...
stymaaran hour ago
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587327
julkalian hour ago
nimby
cogman10an hour ago
Yeah, that seems like it'd be something that would also stop nuclear deployment.
shermantanktopan hour ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind
Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s
I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.
pjc50an hour ago
Where's the solar currently? Is it also victim to NIMBYs? Or shading?
I can understand people objecting to plastering the south facing unshaded Alps with panels, but .. it would certainly generate a lot.
orwinan hour ago
Like I said in another comment: nuclear only makes sense if you build it at scale, because you need very specific skills and knowledge that is hard to get to build it securely, on time and cheap. Ideally you would have one company/conglomerate that would get one plant off the ground per year across the EU, but currently that isn't possible.
includenotfoundan hour ago
I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else, but I guess the economic argument still holds.
Arodexan hour ago
>I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else
AtlasBarfedan hour ago
...You guys have mountains everywhere, which means dirt cheap hydro energy storage for solar and wind?
I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.
I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.
I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.
I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....
I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.
Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale
tribaalan hour ago
Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.
We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)
cogman10an hour ago
Wind would be particularly effective in Switzerland and it's fast to deploy. The swiss grid has less than 1% wind which was pretty shocking to me. It seems like Switzerland has a particularly bad renewable story for an EU nation.
tribaalan hour ago
Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule.
The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).
Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.
calvinmorrisonan hour ago
It's not in the EU. It is part of the Schengen Agreement.
jsnellan hour ago
It's not an EU nation.
cogman10an hour ago
Oh wow, I didn't realize that! That's crazy, basically everyone that borders them are EU members. I was also under the impression (but haven't checked) that it was pretty easy to cross the swiss border both into and out of the EU.
Arodexan hour ago
Switzerland unilaterally got out of negotiations with the EU, which also dealt with energy grid coordination.
As such, as of now, the EU can shut down Switzerland without warning if the grid is overloaded and they need to avoid a blackout.
estebankan hour ago
marcyb5stan hour ago
I think we (as in Switzerland) are preparing for a future in which there is not much snow melt/precipitations to fuel hydro production year round.
In fact, if the AMOC weakens/stops then there will be a drastic drop in precipitation across Europe and funnily enough maybe the temperature drop so much that the little snow there will be won't melt in big enough quantities.
Of course this is just a ban lift, meaning that there are no concrete plans to build one or more, but if there is a need to move "fast" (nuclear is not, I know) at least there is one less hurdle. I sincerily hope we invest in other technologies, especially now that Sodium batteries seem on their way to solve grid level storage, but I don't necessarily see this as a bad move per se.
jl6an hour ago
Small land area, mountainous, northerly latitude… it’s not that wind and solar won’t work, but I don’t think you can automatically compare costs to giga-scale solar farms in spacious and sparsely populated equatorial countries. Even if more expensive, nuclear will have a niche, and it’s madness to rule it out.
nrds2 hours ago
It is no coincidence that countries which need it least can unban it. Deindustrialization activists will focus their efforts on countries where the ban matters.
mrandishan hour ago
Yes, it may be more of a symbolic gesture for Switzerland's own needs but it's still good to correct the historical error of prohibiting a broad range of potentially viable approaches from ever being considered.
iso16312 hours ago
With little land usable for solar and wind I was thinking that Switzerland and Austria would need it more
Edit: Not Norway - Doh!
sisvean hour ago
Norwegian here.
- We have a lot of hydro, that are very cheap to produces and for some of the power plants we fill up water by using solar and wind when that is very cheap and generate power back when it's demand for it (meaning selling it expensive)
-Norway export more then we are importing. But that could shift in the coming years.
-Nuclear power are expensive, so with the current prices it do not make sense to have nuclear in Norway. Thought that could change (see point 2)
- not sure what you mean by "little land usable", you can absolutely be correct. in terms of size we are bigger then Germany. But I'm not sure how much usable land there is vs other countries. We do not have that big population but it's spread out and no one wants a wind park in their neighborhood
iso163117 minutes ago
Sorry not sure why I wrote Norway rather than Austria!
Obviously Norway has massive amounts of offshore wind potential too
marcyb5stan hour ago
I think he was referring to hydro with all the mountains it is actually prime real estate for dams.
philipwhiuk2 hours ago
They can always sell the electricity
this_user2 hours ago
It's far too expensive for that with how cheap renewables are making electricity. France is already struggling with that.
orwinan hour ago
Technically yes, but also no. The European electricity market have way, way to many rules and caveat to draw any conclusion, especially France with ARENH and other distortions.
It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.
I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.
Chaosvexan hour ago
Sure wish the UK could get some of this cheap renewable energy you're referencing.
mpweiheran hour ago
That turns out not to be the case.
France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.
Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.
starbix2 hours ago
This is going to be a huge waste of time and money until we realize that building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then. Instead we could also just join a French project, who have way more experience.
We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead.
There will be a referendum anyways, so I think it's unlikely the ban will actually be lifted.
abecedarius2 hours ago
"I expect they're too expensive" is a terrible reason to ban them, though.
gpman hour ago
It is when it's tied to "and I expect they're going to ask for giant subsidies from taxpayers".
Which nuclear inevitably does, both in the form of direct requests for money and by refusing to pay for adequate insurance to compensate everyone who will be damaged in the event of a meltdown externalizing the risks.
abecedarius20 minutes ago
If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper.
(I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I've only visited a couple times for a few weeks. Their politics seemed healthier than I've seen elsewhere, fwiw.)
SiempreViernes2 hours ago
That's not why they were banned, and in any case lifting a ban on building something that nobody will build doesn't seem like good use of legislators time.
mpweiheran hour ago
At least one Kanton has already requested a new build.
https://www.nuklearforum.ch/de/news/neues-kernkraftwerk-im-a...
IAmBroom2 hours ago
> building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then.
That's a helluva prediction.
Thorium reactors would be practically limitless in fuel supply, but we aren't getting them without seriously funded nuclear research. That is far less likely during a band on commercial stations.
Arodexan hour ago
>Thorium reactors
The same reactors nuclear powers with decades of experience haven't deployed?
We will get two or three revolutions in solar power and battery technology before a single thorium reactor is viable. You could invest all the R&D budget of thorium reactors in perovskite panels and it would generate more MW per CHF invested.
warumdarum22 minutes ago
Swiss will get nukes, denmark will get nukes, sweden will get nukes, finland will get..poland, ukraine, germany, armenia, georgia, armenia, turkey, vietnam, japan, south korea, emirates all gonna get, saudi already got.. [this list is incomplete, you can help to complete this list by doing a empire]. Ironically during the cold war a ton of countries went and became almost nuclear powers. Now thos world is so back baby and the reality denial and loud noises do nothing. Almost as if this plot device never had any connection to anything.
Zigurdan hour ago
This is at best the concept of a vibe shift. Even if they started sprinting now, it would be 20 years before anyone would see the results of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear is so much more expensive than solar and wind that building one is certain to raise electricity prices.
dukoid21 minutes ago
It's why big oil loves it: We need to do nothing now because nuclear is coming "soon"
Arodexan hour ago
A long-form exploration of energy in Switzerland for those interested:
https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...
firefaxan hour ago
One of the little gems the Russians pulled off in the twenty aughts when they were flooding nonprofits in the USA with dirty money was hijacking the green movement to promote fracking. (Because surely ANYTHING is better than those dastardly electrons or whatever the fuck radiation is made of)
Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants, and with advances in breeder technology new plants doesn't nessecarily mean new mining operations, which often are quite harsh on the surrounding area.
rsync37 minutes ago
“Switzerland, unlike the USA, seems capable of safely operating these plants …”
I would have said that about the Japanese as well…
Arodex2 hours ago
Like the F-35 fighter jet, this is just another victory for lobbyists in the industry who will be able to siphon public money into over-budget, deadline busting white whale projects that will never recoup its costs.
Especially nuclear. It is now economically non-viable.
TiredOfLife3 minutes ago
It it turns out like the F-35 it would be amazing. F-35 is much better and safer than what came before and more important CHEAPER per unit than previous generations.
bit-anarchist2 hours ago
What lobbyists? Concrete powder companies? Other governmental companies?
Keep in mind similar things have been said about solar and wind previously.
Arodexan hour ago
Civil engineering, power equipment (ABB is a big firm in Switzerland), Energy companies (the market is Switzerland is a constellation of local monopolies, who have already announced they won't invest their own huge money reserves in nuclear, it will have to be all public money and garanties), etc.
bbu2 hours ago
that's just lifting the ban and is pure virtue signaling. none of the electricity producers in switzerland actually want build nuclear power plants, because they are way too expensive.
flanked-everglan hour ago
Much cheaper to outsource all production and industry to China as Europe is doing.
pfannlan hour ago
Keeping the option open seems prudent. The hard part is winter reliability, not summer generation.
whycome3 hours ago
Best way to provide power to a population over 10 million
JumpCrisscross3 hours ago
And if the world goes to shit again, having a baseline for building an Alpine nuclear deterrent isn't the worst thing to have on soil.
philipkglass2 hours ago
Switzerland has several operating nuclear reactors:
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Switzerland also studied nuclear weapons production until 1988:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_and_weapons_of_mas...
If the Swiss thought it was in the national interest to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and crash-develop a nuclear deterrent, I think that they could achieve nuclear breakout quickly.
iso16312 hours ago
Best way for who?
Nuclear is vastly more expensive per MWh than renewables. It's better than pumping stuff out the ground sure, but that's about it.
iso16317 minutes ago
And as usual the nuclear brainwashed lobby on HN still think it's 1990 and nuclear is cost effective.
It can't cope with peaks. It has to generate the same power 24/7 to be anywhere near economical at two-three times the cost of solar+storage, so it either needs massive storage or massive overprovision
Lets say you have a peak demand of say 40GW but average demand of 600GWh a day (25GW), or 219TWh a year
Lets also say you have to shut down a plant for a week a year for maintenence
You need to build five, 10GW plants to meet your demand.
They provide 5 * 10GW * 24 hours * 7 days * 51 weeks or 428TWh.
If nuclear is $110 per MWh, that means it's going to cost you $47b a year to generate your power requirement, or $215 per MWh
So you're needing to roll out storage, same as you do for wind and solar, or spend twice as much on overproducing.
rz2k2 hours ago
I wonder if they’ll stagger their waking hours so that electric power consumption matches the inflexible output of nuclear reactors.
IAmBroom2 hours ago
Storage is a thing.
Arodexan hour ago
If storage is a thing, then solar makes more sense.
appplicationan hour ago
If only there were a supplemental daylight-based power source that precisely matched peak output to waking hours.
beanjuiceII2 hours ago
fantastic!
slackfan2 hours ago
Excellent.
stefantalpalaruan hour ago
[dead]
khalican hour ago
Those energy conglomerates are really desperate for public money aren't they? Sorry guys, solar and wind are cheaper
nullbioan hour ago
AI made this inevitable. Every country will follow.