epistasis 9 hours ago

As technology improves, we have less and less need for nuclear. The continent with the greatest need for nuclear is Europe, and these German grid modelers have taken a look at the EU grid with the latest data and decided that additional baseload generation (like nuclear) is not required and will likely increase costs if built:

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...

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  • jdkee 9 hours ago

    Germany took it's last three nuclear reactors offline in 2023 and now the primary source of their electrical generation is coal.

    See https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

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    • fxde 8 hours ago

      Your claim about current electrical generation is incorrect and obviously not supported by your source, which shows data from 2021.

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    • epistasis 6 hours ago

      In addition to the other corrections here, I'd like to add one more remarkable fact: in 2025 the share of German electricity generated by solar increased to 18% from 14%. That's in a single year, in a country with terribly low levels of sun! Nuclear generated 5% of electricity before it was shut down, and had generated that same percentage for more than a decade (that's as far back as the chart I saw went).

      It's remarkably easy to scale solar to very large amounts in short time periods. Far easier than building a new nuclear fleet.

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lostlogin 6 hours ago

Is it though? Do we need more ads and more social media company AI?

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dakiol 9 hours ago

[flagged]

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  • tombert 9 hours ago

    Not the OP, but I think the argument is that even if they're doing it for the wrong reasons, it might still end up being a good thing.

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    • AnishLaddha 9 hours ago

      A core assumption of capitalism is that when individuals act in their own self-interest, their actions tend to produce outcomes that are beneficial for society as a whole. This seems like a compelling piece of evidence!

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      • hamdingers 7 hours ago

        > This seems like a compelling piece of evidence!

        Bit of a premature celebration here, we won't know if it is for 10-30 years.

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      • tombert 9 hours ago

        I think that's, generally speaking, not true, as evidenced by the fact that climate change is still happening almost entirely due to selfish motivations of oil companies and bribed politicians.

        I think it's probably a good thing in this case.

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    • dakiol 9 hours ago

      What kind of logic is that? It reminds me some people I know that vote to extreme-right parties because "well, we know that the regular parties are not gonna change anything. These new guys may do something new. Who knows, let's vote them and find out"

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      • tombert 9 hours ago

        Well, no, I think that the claim is that having nuclear power plants is better than not having them. If they're not sucking energy off the grid (like what is happening right now), that at least will help avoid regular people like us having to pay the increased prices and indirectly subsidizing them.

        And nuclear energy is clean (from a climate change perspective at least), and so if they're going to keep spending huge amounts of energy AI training anyway, it's probably better to do that in a way that isn't going to keep boiling the planet.

        Also, if there is any kind of excess energy then it can be fed back into the grid, meaning that grid power can be fed from something relatively clean compared to something dirty (like coal).

        I'm not entirely sure how this relates to the party thing. I'm saying that sometimes something selfish in a capitalistic system can occasionally still be a net good. I didn't think that was controversial. I'm not saying we give Zuckerberg a trophy or anything.

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