The problem is that just because you‘re detecting something, it does not mean it is worth watching. Bodies are not standardized and most people habe something off. But you can‘t really reschedule everybody constantly, as that would entirely break the concept.
"Worth watching" implies that watching is expensive. It's really not. A full-body MRI scan is about $1k, and it can be even cheaper.
So if you have abnormal findings in 10% of patients that merit follow-up scans, you can trivially do a series of 3-4 scans without affecting the overall cost too much.
Doctors simply need to get out of the headspace where MRIs are extremely scarce tools of last resort and treat them like we treat blood tests.
I totally agree. US healthcare is broken and costs aren't tied to the reality of how expensive something actually is. I have very high hopes that modern medicine is in for a massive disruptive change where things like full body MRI, along with analysis, could be done very cheap and with no admin overhead. In that model 'we see something we aren't sure of. It is probably nothing but to be sure we want to do follow-ups' is far less of a problem.
A lot of this however is how it is discussed with the patient. Discussions about the likelihood of there being a real issue when something is seen need to be clear and informative without being alarming. 'We did a routine scan and these often show transient artifacts that turn out to be nothing, but in an abundance of caution we want to do a followup' is totally different than 'we saw something we are concerned about and need to do a followup'. How things are messaged really matters.
> MRIs are extremely scarce tools of last resort and treat them like we treat blood tests.
How would this work?
I can do a blood test and send it to the lab to be processed in ~5 minutes from the moment I meet the patient. Consumable costs are about $2.
I can also do an MR scan. It took a fair bit of training and the scanner and scan room cost about US$2 million. Service contracts on the scanner, scan room, chillers and required staffing utterly dwarf the cost of the scanner over its lifetime.
The scan takes 20-75 minutes. Then the images get sent for reporting. Unlike a blood test, reporting isn’t automated. Even if it was, how could availability of MR ever be similar to a blood test?
> I can do a blood test and send it to the lab to be processed in ~5 minutes from the moment I meet the patient. Consumable costs are about $2.
This depends on a blood test. Bacteria cultures or PCR tests still take more time.
A mid-range scanner costs $500k, the room itself indeed might cost more. Just as real estate. Scanners are just not scarce anymore, there are even sites that sell used ones: https://prizmedimaging.com/collections/mri-equipment (I now want one in my backyard...)
So you're looking at maybe $1k a day that you need to pay towards the device cost. The consumables (helium) are pretty negligible.
A full-body scan is about 1 hour. But for a follow-up you will need to focus only on a few areas, reducing that to maybe 20 minutes. So one device can feasibly do 10 primary scans a day and 20-30 follow-ups. So the cost of the device itself becomes on the order of $100 per imaging session.
This is literally in the "blood test" expenses range.
> Unlike a blood test, reporting isn’t automated.
Radiology readings is one thing where AI is already making inroads. And radiologists can be located anywhere, it's a perfectly remotable job.
> Even if it was, how could availability of MR ever be similar to a blood test?
Yeah, indeed. How can we imagine that people will have computers on their _desks_ when even a small IBM takes half a building?
Mass production happened. And this time it has taken the industry completely by surprise.
The Skyra is end of life and the ones I know of are getting pulled out. Too old. The generation after it is getting on too. The new generation will appear next year. Likely ‘dry’ magnets - low helium usage. The Siemens 1.5T has already had this upgrade.
> So you're looking at maybe $1k a day that you need to pay towards the device cost. The consumables (helium) are pretty negligible.
A service contract is expensive and also required. I’d expect them to be up to about US$75-100k a year. Coils are US$10-20k each and a scanner has about 10 different ones. We blow about one a month across our scanners and get them replaced. Various things break, and it comes in waves. In recent months: the body coil blew (this is a big deal, $150k?), gradient amp, amp cables, helium expansion vessel, vacuum pump, bore screen, knee coil, another knee coil. The service contract covers all the repairs.
>A full-body scan is about 1 hour.
You can do them in 30-45mins, improving the business case.
But for a follow-up you will need to focus only on a few areas, reducing that to maybe 20 minutes.
Doing a real scan of a body site is vastly better, and is about 20 mins per region.
> So one device can feasibly do 10 primary scans a day and 20-30 follow-ups. So the cost of the device itself becomes on the order of $100 per imaging session. This is literally in the "blood test" expenses range.
We get around that number out of our scanners doing real scans and our costs are a lot more than that.
I don’t see staffing mentioned? A good tech will improve throughout, and you need more than one. A good operation will have several per scanner. They reduce the ever present danger and keep the operation running smoothly. I’m biased, I’m a tech.
Another thing missing - liability. I work in a country that isn’t quite as full of lawsuits as the US. Whole body scans are a glorious way of collecting liability. Poor quality images of everything in ‘well’ patients. As a rule in imaging, ask a good question get a good answer. When you’re searching the whole patient for something’s it’s easy to miss something.
> How can we imagine that people will have computers on their _desks_ when even a small IBM takes half a building?
Mass production happened. And this time it has taken the industry completely by surprise.
The radiologist needs to be onsite. We give drugs. They inject things, they biopsy, they are doing stuff.
Yes, lots of stuff can be done remotely and AI assisted. Assuming they can all be replaced assumes a role that the radiologist had a long time ago, or maybe never had.
There are a lot of efficiencies that can be made, and radiology needs all the help it can get, but it isn’t a ludicrously inefficient or stuck in the past.
> I don’t see staffing mentioned? A good tech will improve throughout, and you need more than one. A good operation will have several per scanner. They reduce the ever present danger and keep the operation running smoothly. I’m biased, I’m a tech.
That's why I put the cost of the scan at $1k, to make room for a profit margin and the staffing cost (which will be more than equipment).
Liability is an issue, but not an insurmountable one. If you get poor-quality images, you can just retake them. So biasing radiologists towards that can be a workable solution. There is also a lawsuit in the US going on against one of the full-body scan companies that missed a cancer, so we'll see how it turns out.
> The radiologist needs to be onsite. We give drugs. They inject things, they biopsy, they are doing stuff.
For clinical MRI. Not the diagnostic screening ones, they are done without any contrast.
> There are a lot of efficiencies that can be made, and radiology needs all the help it can get, but it isn’t a ludicrously inefficient or stuck in the past.
Radiology is fine, the AI will help them to do quick screening and point out possible pathologies.
I think you're missing the point. The psychological cost of a conditional-positive result is nonzero, and can be very significant (I speak from a little bit of experience here). But far more importantly: the physiological cost of invasive followups when you eventually trip the threshold of "time to go explore with a scalpel" is very high, and the missing evidence this story is about is whether you can get to that threshold with an MRI.
Treating MRIs the way we treat blood tests would almost certainly result in huge numbers of needless invasive procedures.
> Treating MRIs the way we treat blood tests would almost certainly result in huge numbers of needless invasive procedures.
Again, _all_ you need to do is to make a follow-up scan in 1-3 months to see if there are any changes. It's a preventative tool, so unless you have other indications, it's almost always safe to wait for a bit.
And yes, it requires educating patients that sometimes just waiting and doing a follow-up scan is right. And yes, I also have a personal experience with that (I had an "idiopathic lymphadenopathy", aka "we don't know WTF is going on").
It's a good thought experiment, but what you really need here is a randomized controlled study to see if your new plan results in better outcomes, before you roll it out to the whole world.
* Doctors and medical researchers keep saying that routine MRIs for non-symptomatic or low-risk patients is a bad idea, because the outcomes are worse than not scanning.
* There's several clear, understandable mechanistic reasons why this would be the case, including simple applications of the base rate fallacy.
* Nevertheless, here we are, nerds arguing we know better than all these people.
And I don't buy that. EXACTLY this was also said about prostate cancer screening. Word-for-word. "Overdiagnosing", "people are better off not knowing", "psychological burdens", "invasive procedures", etc.
Now we have multiple longitudinal studies of people receiving aggressive screening and the usual standard of care. The aggressive screening group, unsurprisingly, has better outcomes with less mortality.
> * There's several clear, understandable mechanistic reasons why this would be the case, including simple applications of the base rate fallacy.
Yeah. I guess it's time to stop using fire alarms. People are better off not knowing if a building is on fire, and frequent false alarms have a negative effect on psychological well-being.
Just look at the risk of burning to death. Alarms make no sense at all!
> * Nevertheless, here we are, nerds arguing we know better than all these people.
Yes. Absolutely. And I actually have read (I think) all the studies, and came thoroughly unimpressed. They're utterly sloppy with poor statistical analyses.
It's absolutely an indictment of the medical industry that has become so crusty that it can't be bothered to integrate new diagnostic modality. That is the _only_ way to detect multiple lethal cancers while they are still curable.
You're not engaging with the logic. Stipulate that it is the only way to detect multiple lethal cancers. If you end up harming more people than you help, the intervention is bad. Right now, you're only looking at one half of the balance sheet.
> Stipulate that it is the only way to detect multiple lethal cancers.
This is trivially true.
> If you end up harming more people than you help, the intervention is bad.
The only pathway through which diagnostic MRIs can feasibly harm people is aggressive follow-up of uncertain findings. And this is almost completely solved by just doing another scan several weeks/months in the future. With corresponding patient education.
This is literally all what was needed in the case of prostate cancer screening: less aggressive biopsies and bias towards observation rather than action. Yet it took _two_ _decades_ to arrive at this point. And some doctors _still_ refuse to order screening tests out of this misplaced idea of "not knowing is better".
And this is not the only time when "geeks knew better". For example, checklists for surgeries are a no-brainer to anyone with an aviation background. Yet they became standard only two decades ago ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6032919/ )! Over rather strong objections from doctors.
The people arguing against routine MRI scans are the checklist people!
But, look: if you think routine prostate screening is a good idea, I don't have a counterargument. You're right: there's already an emerging discipline of watchful waiting with prostate pathologies.
The argument being made here is about full body MRI scans: doing a dragnet sweep looking for neoplasms anywhere and everywhere. Not the same thing! Similarly: my belief that the EBM people are right about full-body scans doesn't mean I oppose colon cancer screening!
> The argument being made here is about full body MRI scans: doing a dragnet sweep looking for neoplasms anywhere and everywhere. Not the same thing!
It's exactly the same thing, but on a larger scale. Yes, it will likely require at least some adjustment to the standards of care and development of more stringent criteria for follow-up procedures. But we're already talking about fine-tuning, rather than something fundamental.
Here's a study from one of the providers:
> Prenuvo's recent Polaris Study followed 1,011 patients for at least one year following a whole-body MRI scan. Of these patients, 41 had biopsies. More than half of the 41 were diagnosed with cancer. Of these cancers, 68% didn't have targeted screening tests and 64% were localized when detected. The company says it finds possibly life-threatening conditions in 1 in 20 people.
So we're talking about the real-world 4% rate for biopsies, with about 50% false positive rate. This is not that far removed from the current clinical 30% false positive rate. And this is far from the apocalyptic scenarios of multiple biopsies for every patient.
> To date, no study has been performed that rigorously investigates the impact on disease-specific survival following whole body MRI in asymptomatic patients without specific risk factors, and no study has been performed to confirm that a ‘negative’ whole body MRI excludes significant disease 5 or more years’ later.
The only real remaining argument is cost effectiveness of MRI, especially for government-based healthcare. It is a valid argument, but it's beside the point for people who are self-paying. And it's also missing the implications of economy of scale.
So I'm pretty sure in this particular case the geeks indeed know more than doctors.
> My father is a part of "full body PET scan every 3 years" program as part of post - cancer treatment,
These treatments are wonderful and it is great that they exist. But many people fail to understand the difference in terms of pretest probability, etc.
I can absolutely see the heavy psychological impact pending biopsy results may have. People are quick to discount these issues when you raise them as a concern, but only if they never went through this stress themselves
Sorry, I missed a key detail. What you are describing isn’t the ‘whole body mri’ I’m referencing by to.
People in high risk situations like multiple myeloma, or various metastic diseases, or system conditions are a whole different category and there is clear benefit to screening them.
> Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?
It could be. It could also be the cade that you undergo invasive surgery for something that would have never caused you problems within your life. The problem is that cancer isn‘t cancer. Even if it originates from the same tissue, some tumors behave very different from others.
I'm curious as to how this will shift once the shift towards more electrification continues. This is only about electricity generation, not total power consumption.
Nowadays, for very energy intenive things like heating or driving a car, fossil fuels still are more prevalent than electric alternatives. Once demand shifts in favor of the electrified alternatives, electricity demand is continuing to raise (although not as steep as the drop in demand for the fossil fuels will be). Particularly in heating, where peak demand is in times with very little solar generation, it seems like this will be challenging.
While the prices of energy storage have come down significantly and are projected to continue to drop, there is still a noteable lack of cost effective long term storage solutions.
> Particularly in heating, where peak demand is in times with very little solar generation, it seems like this will be challenging.
Heating is actually likely to be one of the easier questions here, because heat is just fundamentally an easier problem to tackle than most other intensive uses of energy in the modern world.
1. Solar isn't the only incredibly cheap form of intermittant renwewable energy production. Wind is also great, tends to support local manufacturing economies more than solar, and is anti-correlated with peak-sunshine. The wind tends to blow hardest in the winter and around sunset.
2. Heatpumps can pretty comfortably achieve 300+% coefficients of performance, meaning that for every joule of energy you put into a heatpump, you'll get 3+ joules of heat pumped into your home, office, or city-scale heat thermos
3. Heat energy storage is cheap compared to batteries. You just store large quantities of water or sand and heat it up with a resistor or a heat pump. The scaling of surface area versus volume ensures that the bigger you make the heat-battery, the less energy you'll lose from it over time (percentage wise).
4. Heat is a waste product from many other forms of energy usage, and can be harnessed. For instance, gas peaker plants aren't going away any time soon, and cities which aren't harnessing the waste heat from those peaker plants and using it in a district heating system are wasting both money and carbon.
Just a couple kilometers from my home for instance is a gas power plant that stores waste heat in giant thermoses, and pumps hot water to my building to to be used for heating. They currently have the largest heat pump in europe under construction on the same site intended to supplement the gas plant, both to take up slack from the fact that it'll be running less often, and to expand the service to yet more households.
Regarding the affect of EV adoption on electricity consumption the site https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/ has some interesting data. I'd recommend looking at the following graphs:
* Distance travelled by passenger cars in Norway
* EV electricity consumption and total power generation in Norway
EVs now make up approximately 1/3 of miles travelled, but the increase in total electrcity consumption is fairly small.
This is just objectively untrue. Source: I live in Germany, a country with some of the highest electricity prices, I drive a BEV and I heat my home with a heatpump. My systems SCOP hovers around 3.5, which means that my kWh of heat made from my heatpump with electricity is cheaper than my current gas rate.
My heatpump electricty bill is significantly lower as compared to my apartment (Gas furnace), despite both buildings being roughly comparable late 80s construction.
I charge my car at my standard electrcity rate of 32ct/kWh, and I pay now about half for the same usage.
Electricity is expensive, yeah. But electrified stuff is also significantly more efficient than fossil tech
You pay less vs gas heating because of co2 tax.
And it's just an individual case. Germany's electrification percent is lower vs China's amd the rate of changing is lower too. In other words Germany has more energy used indirectly instead of electricity and electrification percent increase per year is lower than China's too
Amd Germany isn't even the worst example in terms of electricity prices. UK is even worse which will slow it down even more
> Electricity/heating and gasoline in the EU is many times more expensive than in the U.S.
Maybe because Europe as a whole has little to no signifcant oil reserves ready for extraction? Very much unlike the US.
> I would think that most people would happily choose lower prices over clean energy and paper straws.
The US does have plenty of cheap energy and yet its industrial output is dwarfed by Chinas, which is increasingly relying on domestically products green tech. Also, people seem to be not very concerned with energy prices. If they were, they would not act as irrational when it comes to topics like heatpumps or electric vehicles.
> that it almost makes you think that politicians are being bought by Chinese companies/government.
Looking at the energy policy of some countries (Germany specifically), it seems vastly more likely that politicans are bought by oil companies.
True, there is no oil and we just relied on cheap gas from Russia--which I guess it didn't turn out to be a good strategy after all.
That's interesting about oil companies. Is that who's lobbing to pass laws that just seem (to me) to be written on purpose to make our companies less competitive? How does that work, how do oil companies profit from that?
Yes, and against bike lanes so more people have to drive, and against subsidies for public transport, and against public transport entirely, and so on.
big part is co2 tax. EU now has neptune deep and could explore north sea too. In Germany current transition pathway of ren+gas and no nuclear was defined when Energiewende got introduced with red greens under Schroeder, a gazprom lover and later extended by red blacks
Nuclear does not cause prices to be lower. Putting that aside, political discourse here in Germany was "interesting" to say the least.
The shift to renewables started off pretty well in the early 2010s before it came to a grinding halt thanks to some wierd debates around the topic. For the past few years, buildout of solar has been remarkably fast, especially considering the slow pace of other projects. In 2025, 16.4 GW of solar power went live.
The biggest issue that drives prices here is the grid. New high voltages transmission lines have faced intense local oppsition, so transmision between North and South is limited, which is problematic given the focus of the north on (offshore) wind and the south on solar PV. Since Germany is a single electricity price zone, the low to negative electricity prices from wind turbines do not reflect the reality of grid capabilities, resulting in significant redispatch costs.
The solution would be obvious. Split Germany into n electicity price zones (with n>1). However, there is a lot of political opposition, specifically from the conservative CDU/CSU against this.
So yeah, Germany is struggling with relatively expensive electrcity prices, complaining about it, but refusing to implement a borderline free solution for it.
Nuclear that was built a long time ago would probably have lowered the prices in DE right now, if they weren't shut down. I understand that building new ones right now makes little sense.
Refurb costs are for the entire fleet which is 50+GW and are in fact dirt cheap. Refurbs are in 1-3bn/unit range. CF of say solar in this region is roughly 10-12%. To have same average output as a single 1GW npp you would need about 10GW solar and much more if you want to achieve firm generation. French refurbs will happen anyway. In fact, carenage is already undergoing.
You need to read precisely what's happening. Ontario wants to front finance all refurbs and SMRs instead of spreading the financing over years like it's usually done.
BWRX is expensive for sure. It'll cost more per GW than the failed french FLA3 or Vogtle. To me this seems a mistake considering Canada had Candus, an own authentic design that doesn't rely on enriched fuel and they did some very serious refurbs recently on time and on budget. On the other hand, bwrx is american tech and needs enriched fuel and SMRs will always have worse economics than large units, there's a reason humanity scales everything up, be it nuclear, be it wind turbines or solar fields
Again. Refurbs are extremely cheap. At 1-3bn/unit you get 1GW of firm power. That would be vastly cheaper vs deploying say solar, that would have the same TWh/y averaged even with China's costs. And this doesn't even account for firming.
Heck, even Barakah built as new by Korea is competitive vs renewables in the west. And it's understandable considering they spent per unit 1/3 of what FLA3 did cost... In under half of the time
The question is rather why they want front financing. But I have some clues considering who is their current head of govt
> The question is rather why they want front financing. But I have some clues considering who is their current head of govt
I assumed it was, like the UK, because it let them avoid committing to a specific price like all the other competing technologies so they could raise the price later once the project was too far along to cancel.
Maybe for smr, but for refurbs it doesn't make sense - all recent refurbs were either on time or ahead of planned timeline and on budget. Heck, even if refurbs would suddenly triple in price it would still be dort cheap vs any alternative for 1GW of firm power.
And they kinda committed to a price with Hitachi, that's why we can say it'll be worse even than recent failed big projects.
UK has other problems to tackle, mostly heavy overregulation. UK's HPC and french FLA3 are very different in many aspects, ranging from more concrete &steel use, up to a parallel analog system on top of a parallel digital system because UK regulation is 'special'. Maybe things will change, we'll see
To me this front financing looks like a cash grab from political entities since nobody guarantees money will be used in this direction, especially with current Ontario's 'governor', that dude is local trump equivalent but maybe a bit more tempered. Another possible reason is political - this frontload means project can't be easily cancelled if relationship with US gets even worse, since Hitachi GE is an US company. So who knows. Either way, IMO bwrx decision wasn't smart and front loading isn't smart too. But this has nothing to do with refurbs cost which are dirt cheap
I know about it, affected components were replaced. They still built it relatively on time and on budget
"On 7 February 2014, the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission declared that its investigation since mid-2013, they found eight cases out of 2,075 samples of foreign manufactured reactor components that were supplied with fake documents."
Nope. 7 years late (plan: 2017, last reactor diverged in 2024).
Total cost not known, at least 24.5 billion USD and maybe up to 32 according to Bloomberg (plan: 20). Koreans are even fighting: KHNP (a subsidiary of KEPCO, the company building the plant) officially seeks for about 1.2 billion USD in compensation ( https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=... ) and it may worsen up.
8bn/unit is successful considering fla3 was 23bn. 8y/unit is successful, several in parallel with 1y distance, considering fla3/vogtle took about 20y.
Yes. It is a success.
Korea also announced they plan to build two additional reactors domestically by 2038
I've seen what a success Energiewende was. Really top notch execution to spend more than the entire french fleet and after 25y to have much worse emissions, while planning to have 80GW gas firming per Fraunhofer ISE to cover under generation periods
> 8bn/unit is successful considering that FL3 was 23bn.
Yes, a failure is better than a disaster. As we say in France, "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
> Korea also announced their plan.
For 25 years, numerous announcements of this kind have been made by many nations, without any real intention of following through, and for various reasons (electoral considerations, will to create competition for renewable energy suppliers, etc.).
Only projects that are actually starting (on the ground) provide a good indication.
> Energiewende
> spends more than the entire French fleet
On the one hand, France's transition to nuclear power began with the first industrial nuclear power reactor (dubbed "EDF1") in 1957. In 1959, the project for the power plant that would be completed in Chooz in 1967 began, and as early as 1964, nuclear power was presented to the public as the energy source that would take over in 1975 (correctly predicting that in Europe it would produce 25% of electricity 20 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6Xfu8u3Yqw).
This nuclearization lasted approximately 40 years.
Furthermore, nuclear power did not replace a huge set of existing electricity-producing sector, such as coal in Germany, because in 1970 France produced about four times less electricity than at the end of its nuclear power deployment: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
In short: comparing France's nuclearization with the Energiewende is extremely difficult, and a direct comparison absurd.
> planning to have 80GW of gas-fired power plants
In early 2026, Germany announced it would deploy new gas-fired power plants. The impact depends on the corresponding emissions. If they are only all active for a few hours a year to get through critical periods and (as planned) replace coal or primarily burn green hydrogen, for example, then it will be progress (reducing emissions). The best-case scenario is a full renewable fleet but Rome wasn't built...
1- 8bn/unit is pretty acceptable if you adjust for capacity factors and compare to solar projects in say Germany that would on avg deliver same power per year and even better if you want firm power.
2- announcement is recent and made by a somewhat antinuclear PM which changed the course seeing that ren alone are not sufficient. It's in the context when Korea will soon finish 2 units locally. In fact if for some reason govt will change there, plans will probably accelerate
Why should I read a nonsensical antinuclear article by a rando on the internet when there are official numbers from court of auditors? The numbers of french nuclear program are available. And even if you bump them by 50%, it'll still be cheaper than german EEG expenditure alone and the difference only grows
"This nuclearization lasted approximately 40 years." But messmer plan took much less. We are talking about accelerated deployment and spending. France beat Germany in both. Or maybe we should start counting for germany from the moment first solar panel was deployed there instead of Energiewende proposal? It'll make things look even worse. A direct comparison isn't absurd. Numbers are known in both cases and you clearly want to ignore them. Talking about french prosperous period when DE is biggest EU economy is strange too.
To say gas plants will burn hydrogen when merely 25% mix is already worse economically than failed nuclear projects like Vogtle is at least laughable. The announced gas plants dont match the numbers demanded by Fraunhofer, mostly because EU rules dont allow that. So basically germany is stuck in a strange position where it needs firming but it cannot build it.
Again, France spent considerably less and did the job much faster while Germany still struggles while it's best hope is to have some magical cheap hydrogen to replace gas...
Deeming dispatchable power necessary was valid as long as the technical means (long-distance, high-capacity transmission, smart grids, energy storage, network management software capable of reacting quickly enough and optimizing the system, voltage stabilization and current frequency synthesis tools, etc.) that would have allowed for a mostly non-dispatchable way to generate electricity were too expensive, insufficient, or simply nonexistent.
Now these means exist, and experts assert that it is no longer necessary to deploy a large proportion of dispatchable generation capacity. Therefore, from a technical standpoint, an electrical system based on renewables with the largest resources (wind and solar, which are not dispatchable) is feasible: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/25/will-renewable-energy-d...
> compare to solar projects
"With the cost of storing electricity at $65/MWh, storing 50% of a day’s solar generation for use during the night-time hours adds $33/MWh to the total cost of solar. The global average price of solar in 2024 was $43/MWh. Turning this cheap daytime electricity into a dispatchable profile that is closer to an actual demand profile, would therefore result in a total electricity cost of $76/MWh."
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
The total cost of nuclear power, even when building and managing waste without exceeding the budget, even without accidents, even without uranium supply problems..., is already much higher than that.
He's dead, Jim.
> 2- announcement
> plans will probably accelerate
> Why should I read a nonsensical antinuclear article by a rando on the internet
It is sourced (or you may pinpoint what isn't).
> when there are official numbers from court of auditors?
The referenced article quotes thems!
> even if you bump them by 50%, it'll still be cheaper than german EEG expenditure alone
The cost of the energy transition in Germany is sometimes cited as €300 billion, €500 billion, or even €1.5 trillion.
These figures are worthless because no reputable source publishes a specific figure along with its scope (some aspects of the investments needed for the electricity grid are independent of the energy source) and at least a timeframe.
These figures are actually projections published by various sources, covering distant timeframes (2050, etc.) and encompassing the entire electricity system (including non-renewable energy sources).
We had the same sort of propaganda in France, then EDF (Big Chief of the French nuclear sector) boss stated in public that about 50% of the projected network-related costs are not tied to renewables ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEdQz3hGlf0&t=328s ).
> "This nuclearization lasted approximately 40 years." But messmer plan took much less.
> Numbers are known in both cases and you clearly want to ignore them.
The afore-referenced articles states and sources facts and data. You don't.
> Talking about french prosperous period when DE is biggest EU economy
'Prosperous' is more-or-less 'density', not extension. This past prosperity (massively benefitting to the Messmer Plan) is an historical indeniable fact ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses ).
> gas plants
> hydrogen when merely 25% mix is already worse economically than failed nuclear projects like Vogtle
This is not valid as in this context those hydrogen plants are prototypes, while Vogtle (and other recent projects aiming at building nuclear reactors) are theoritically mastered since the 1970's (Messmer Plan...).
> The announced gas plants dont match the numbers demanded by Fraunhofer, mostly because EU rules dont allow that. So basically germany is stuck in a strange position where it needs firming but it cannot build it.
Indeed, and it may imply that more coal will be burnt. This is ridiculous.
> magical cheap hydrogen
This is indeed a bet, but a non-inept one ( https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news... ), especially as the amount of electricity overproduced by renewables, reflected by episodes of low or even negative spot prices, is constantly increasing.
Nuclear was cheapest firm power in the german merit order. So yes, nuclear does have an impact, especially if it outplaces higher cost units
There is a lot of opposition because zone split would mean erasing southern industry and I may be wrong, but southern regions are pumping most of the money into state budget. Cutting those means cutting own legs.
The high voltage DC transmission lines from north to south are being built right now and for example SuedLink is expected to be operational in 2028. Their transmission capacity will be more than enough. Why would you split Germany into electricity zones now, if in a few years the transmission problem will largely be fixed?
> But it is by no means obvious that carbon taxes are the right path.
When the government says that the market should do something, people complain about government interference. When the government lets the market do something, but sets the right incentives, people are complaining about it again.
Co2 taxation is effectively internalizing the cost of co2 pollution. The price goes up the more we pollute, because we have less budget until we cannot reach our goals anymore.
That is good, because it is a lie that others are not following.
People love to point to China for their emissions, completely avoiding that China, as the workbench of the world, essentially is burdened with the emissions of the world.
Developing nations skip the fossil fuel stage entirely because Solar in particular and at a ceratain point wind is just cheaper than buying Oil and natural gas. Chinese EVs are also increasingly popular in emerging markets, not because they are more environmentally friendly, but because they are more cost effective to operate.
Wether or not it is because of environmental concerns or not, the world is moving towards cleaner technology, specifically it is also more efficient.
Considering that we in Europe have a remarkable absence of easily accessible fossil fuels, Europe should be continuing to push towards renewable technologies
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