EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

Here's a summary of the themes present in the Hacker News discussion:

Germany's Energy Transition and Nuclear Hesitation

A primary theme is the debate around Germany's energy policy, particularly its move away from nuclear power and its reliance on imported energy. There's skepticism about Germany's ability to meet future energy demands, especially with the increasing energy needs of AI and data centers.

"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." - tietjens
"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'." - kulahan
"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." - cyberax
"Germany is also quietly reassuring investors that it's safe to build natural gas by extending the subsidies... As usual, actions speak louder than words." - cyberax
"Germany doesn't need to sabotage France on nuclear energy; France has done a fine job of sabotaging themselves." - pfdietz
"Germany's transition to clean heating is at risk of heat pump sales collapsing, industry warns." - cyberax (referencing an external article)

The Role of Nuclear Power in Addressing Energy Demand

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around whether nuclear power is a necessary component of a future energy mix, particularly to meet the demands of AI. This includes arguments for and against its economic viability, safety, and the speed of deployment.

"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" - bluefirebrand
"Because the reactor will still run 20 years after that while the solar and storage will need to be replaced by then" - bluefirebrand
"Why would fusion reactors magically appear when the entire field of nuclear energy production is, in this scenario, essentially dead??" - kulahan
"Not sure why pursuing fusion needs to building fission reactors." - RandomLensman
"Base load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore." - fundatus
"Damn, so we’re left with nothing, because nuclear is by far the most viable moving forward." - kulahan
"I’d guess Germany’s opposition to French nuclear power wasn’t just about the technology itself, but tied up with political and economic strategy. There must have been stronger political reasons behind it than simply « not liking nuclear »." - darkamaul
"Nuclear is really unpopular with a significant part of the German electorate especially on the left. So, yes, it’s entirely political." - StopDisinfo910
"Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell." - croes
"The Söder-Challenge? The head of the Bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies." - croes
"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." - yellowapple
"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." - epistasis
"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." - sollewitt
"For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all." - mpweiher
"The FÖS 'paper' that gets circle-cited everywhere in anti-nuclear advocacy is complete bollocks. This is obvious from even a cursory reading, but many have also done it in detail." - mpweiher
"Nuclear needs to move from bespoke builds to serial production." - happosai

The Promise and Challenges of Renewables (Solar and Wind)

The discussion also covers the potential of renewable energy sources like solar and wind, but with a focus on their limitations, particularly intermittency and the need for storage.

"Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside)." - RandomLensman
"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." - RandomLensman
"Because the reactor will still run 20 years after that while the solar and storage will need to be replaced by then" - bluefirebrand
"The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas." - aavaa
"Renewables now dominate generation during the optimal periods, but there's nothing on the horizon for other times." - cyberax
"Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions." - cyberax
"Intermittent renewables produce at least an order of magnitude more waste than nuclear reactors, be they fusion or fission." - mpweiher
"If we consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut." - StopDisinfo910
"Grid scale batteries solve this problem." - V__
"The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future." - V__
"Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps." - mulmen
"There are hard limits on wind and solar." - throwawayffffas
"For something that is supposed to be clean it sure keeps making places unhabitable." - stonemetal12
"Solar and battery have had immense investment to bring down that LCOE. Where can we get if we invest similarly in nuclear. lol at wind though. that's not real." - ahmeneeroe-v2
"Even then it's not competitive. And LCOE is only a small part of the cost with intermittent renewables." - mpweiher
"That's only true because both solar panels and batteries are produced in China off cheap coal power. LCOE is not a fundamental metric. EROI is and it's pretty bad for photovoltaics." - alexey-salmin
"Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration." - mpweiher
"The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation." - V__

The Role of Geothermal Energy

Geothermal energy is brought up as a potential base load energy source, with some suggesting it could be a competitor to nuclear power.

"Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside)." - RandomLensman
"It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands" - raverbashing
"I was under the impression tidal was mostly tapped out because any half-decent location has already been turned into a power plant." - kulahan
"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." - pstuart
"Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes." - kulahan
"Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants." - edbaskerville

The AI Energy Demand Bubble and Speculation on its Future

The discussion touches upon the immense energy demands of AI and whether this represented a sustainable trend or a speculative "bubble" that could burst.

"You limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops." - toomuchtodo
"I’m willing to wager that the AI bubble will burst before you could even begin to build power plants for them." - V__
"Building giant powerplant for the AI tech (possible) bubble not seems wise." - ThinkBeat
"The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point." - ThinkBeat
"The data does not back up this narrative: [link to Our World in Data on electricity sources]" - aavaa (referring to a claim made by cyberax about gas replacing renewables)
"The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas." - aavaa
"It’s unbelievable that the country some people are most furious at is the one that has decarbonized at the fastest rate. Not the country next door to it that didnt even try. They are seemingly obsessed with what was once ~8-12% of Germany's power output, but the actual environment? Not that important." - pydry
"AI is useful but nit as useful as the AI companied claim it to be and the ROI isn’t as great neither." - croes
"This is shortsighted. China routinely experiences large overcapacity in their electricity grid just to deal with the unknown unknowns of outages and new demands. Suppose that the AI bubble burst and AI energy use is negligible, the extra capacity could be used for something else..." - kccqzy
"The wait until after the AI bubble and buy the cheap surplus of energy." - croes

Concerns about Nuclear Proliferation and Safety

A recurring theme is the concern about nuclear proliferation – the link between civilian nuclear power and the development of nuclear weapons. Safety aspects, including historical accidents and waste disposal, are also discussed.

"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." - ben_w
"Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects." - SequoiaHope
"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." - exabrial
"Not an expert, but isn't all you basically need to do is running the centrifuges a bit longer? Breeding plutonium is a different process than enriching uranium, sure, but with enough enriched uran you will have a nuclear bomb. And a dirty bomb is bad enough and simple to construct as well." - lukan
"The weapons you can make with plutonium are qualitatively different from the ones you can make with uranium." - marcosdumay
"The question is whether or not having a reactor makes producing bombs easier or not, and clearly the answer is 'yes', bomb-making is easier (yet, sure, still a 'PITA') if you have a reactor core handy to start with." - ajross
"The IAAF inspections verify your claimed inventory and enrichment facilities." - KyleBerezin
"Energy needs like 5% enrichment while weaponizing needs much higher and much more difficult to obtain 85% enrichment" - msk-lywenn
"Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags." - Polizeiposaune
"Which, as I understand it, is because at 20% enrichment you've already done about 70% of the work needed to get to 85%." - magicalhippo
"On one side if you just build LWRs you just don't need very highly enriched uranium or plutonium so posession of those is a red flag. On the other side fast breeder reactors are the ones which are able to produce the least harmful waste. But fast breeders and closed fuel cycles produce and handle plutonium which in turn can be used for bad things." - hugo1789
"Modern weapons use plutonium not uranium, uranium weapons can be constructed." - throwawayffffas
"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." - pydry (referencing an external article)
"The Chernobyl plant had known construction defects that could impair safety. These things would prevent a western plant from starting operation, but did not stop the Soviet plant from beginning operation:" - ryao
"The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one mistake after another. That said, the plant was designed by a country that shot down a civilian airliner that had strayed into their airspace due to a navigational error, when they knew it was a civilian airliner: They had no regard for human life, so of course, they built things that are incredibly unsafe." - ryao
"The Fukushima tsunami killed 20.000+ people, and spilled massive amounts of chemicals and toxic junk to the ocean. Yet people keep fixating over the radioactive pollution, including evicting people from their homes for truly minor amounts of radiation." - happosai
"People who live in Ramsay, Iran, are exposed to higher level of background radiation that n what is allowed for nuclear workers. Yet, there is no elevated levels of cancer or birth defects, not is there a shorter lifespan for people living there either." - happosai
"The Finland has already solved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste: Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository" - quickthrowman

The Role of Subsidies and Regulation in Energy Markets

The discussion highlights the impact of subsidies and regulations on the cost and feasibility of different energy sources, with particular attention to how renewables and nuclear power are treated.

"Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized. Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France) or the fact, that the public has to bear the cost of dismantling them (Germany)." - V__
"For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all." - mpweiher
"The debt that EDF carries is completely normal for a company this size, especially one that does infrastructure. It would be unusual for a company not to use the capital markets to finance such projects." - mpweiher
"The 'subsidies' for EDF (cheaper loans etc.) amount to around € 2.7 - 3 billion a year. By itself, that's obviously not 'minute'. However, these sums are dwarfed by the ARENH program and the profits that EDF pays to the state, which turn the subsidies into 'negative subsidies' in sum." - mpweiher
"In Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all." - mpweiher
"Except financing research and development, guaranteeing loans to reduce default risk and interest rates, capping liabilities to enable insureability at lower rates by guaranteeing to fix damages in case of critical failures with public money, financing and organizing emergency civil protection measures, as well as waste disposal, granting massive tax cuts, doing the diplomatic leg work to import uranium and protecting its transport with the police, all and all summing up public spending on making nuclear energy in germany to 169,4 billion euros..." - Jon_Lowtek
"It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow." - V__
"This, again, is not true. The average is currently at 6.5 years and dropping slightly, the time has been fairly consistent over the last decades." - mpweiher
"Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future." - V__
"That's also false. These costs are almost always included and have little impact on the total cost of power." - mpweiher
"At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize" - V__
"That's also not true. When subsidies for off-shore wind were reduced, Germany, Denmark and the UK had zero bids for wind-parks, and immediately the discussion was 'new subsidy models'." - mpweiher
"It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets." - reenorap
"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." - epistasis
"All the safety and countermeasure costs here ultimately stem from regulation. If we allowed less safe power plants, they would likely be cheaper to build and operate." - darkamaul
"Most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community." - epistasis

Criticisms of Greenpeace and Other Environmental Movements

There's a thread of criticism directed at environmental organizations like Greenpeace, with suggestions that their anti-nuclear stance is misguided, politically motivated, or even influenced by fossil fuel interests.

"I’d guess Germany’s opposition to French nuclear power wasn’t just about the technology itself, but tied up with political and economic strategy." - darkamaul
"Nuclear is really unpopular with a significant part of the German electorate especially on the left. So, yes, it’s entirely political." - StopDisinfo910
"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." - robotnikman
"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." - pydry
"I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence. However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates." - jltsiren
"Maybe you could argue against the actual arguments Greanpeace make against nuclear instead of making ad-hominem statements." - xrisk
"The more I observe a lot of activists the more I suspect, a lot of organizations and movements are cold war era Soviet psyOps that outlived their handlers." - throwawayffffas