It seems that your entire account history is dedicated to producing low-quality, low-information comments in favor of nuclear energy. This makes it all the more ironic when you then accuse me and others of being "driven by ideology" despite the second sentence of my comment mentioning how I was in favor of nuclear power for many years.
Most of your comment is information-free, but I will respond to the single point you made. You mention the production, maintenance, and disposal of solar panels also require labor. Yes, obviously. Do you not realize that nuclear energy is far more labor-intensive per watt for each of those, or do you simply not care?
My argument is simple: labor costs will dominate for both battery-solar and nuclear; labor costs per watt are significantly higher for nuclear; thus as the cost of labor increases with time, nuclear fission will be increasingly unaffordable. If you want to debate that, please come armed with relevant facts, not vague statements and unrelated tangents.
I honestly write about nuclear power because I find the discussions around the topic interesting. It is by no means a primary topic in my everyday life, though, quite the contrary. Having said that, I don't understand what you can be interested in and what it adds to the discussion how I spend my free time, you are invited to argue in context if you want to argue on the merits. Also because I don't think that wasting time looking at my profile is much better.
First of all I would like to see some data, I know as far as nuclear is concerned, operating and maintenance costs are only a fraction of the costs in the bill, which in some charts is 10 to 25 percent usually. So even if labor costs were double, there would not be a doubling of prices. Just as if the price of uranium triples, the impact is very small.
The staff needed according to this report is 1.5 people/Mw on small plants (the older ones), 1 for large plants, up to 0.7 people for large plants with multiple reactors.
And SMRs will serve to lower this number even further. Although the number is highly variable since we are talking about so many different design types, and that especially as more reactors are installed fewer people per Mw are needed.
But as you can see the trend is quite negative, both in terms of normal reactors already in operation and future prospects.
Do you have any data about solar? And I would like to emphasize that solar alone is not enough, so the staff needed to store some of the energy would also need to be considered (battery?).
Otherwise we have to considers nuclear + renewable (my ideal mix), but at that point there would be nothing to argue about probably, since for me it's not a renewable vs. nuclear war, but I consider them both necessary.
Finally, just for intellectual honesty, it is worth underlining that one MW of nuclear power cannot in any way be considered on par with one MW of solar power, due to intermittency. I think it is a necessary premise to be able to make any type of comparison between the two.
I am not here to consider nuclear energy the best or flawless source of energy, on the contrary I recognize its limits and problems. I am simply here to defend it against those who want to exclude it to decarbonize. Because I am convinced that there is a lot, too much, wishful thinking around renewables. And that this is the first obstacle to being able to decarbonize.
If you do not realize that labor is by far the largest cost in nuclear power then I am not sure you have done even elementary thinking or research on the subject and we have nothing to discuss here. Obviously labor costs go beyond operating and maintenance. Have you considered design, regulatory, construction, legal costs (all mostly labor?)
Similarly, if you do not realize that the labor associated with the design, construction and maintenance of solar is a fraction of that of nuclear I would be quite impressed at the depth to which you have buried your head in the sand. Do you truly believe that the operation of a solar panel (wipe clean occasionally) or a battery (swap for a new one if it dies) is comparable to that of a nuclear reactor?
I suspect you have gone for the operation labor angle because it is the only one without obvious easily-Googleable figures showing the dramatic delta between battery-solar and nuclear. Amusingly, the figures are not easily Googleable because they are so small, but I will provide two for real-world solar plants. The Oberon solar plant near Odessa, Texas is 180MW and will employ 2 (two) FTE plus 2-3 seasonal local jobs for maintenance [1] and the also-named-Oberon battery-solar plant in California is 500MW and will employ a maximum of 10 employees at any time [2]. The labor to operate battery-solar plants is insignificant.
I am sorry that your frustration is so great that you have to insult and make unnecessary comments. I do not intend to continue the discussion any further. Bye.
My "frustration is so great" because you litter this site with ideological flamewars, baiting comments, name-calling etc; every single one of your account's comments are on a single topic - nuclear energy - of which you seem to have strangely little knowledge. When someone disagrees with you, you call them a Marxist, accuse them of intellectual dishonesty, pure ideology, or call them a paid shill.
First of all, your arguments may be as valid as you like, but your insults and personal attacks, as far as I'm concerned, nullify your reasoning entirely. You can criticize my positions all you want, but I've never attacked you personally, whereas you have.
That said, the pattern in all my discussions is very clear: those who criticize nuclear power often pick a single metric to argue against it, defending this metric to the extreme while completely ignoring the overall complexity of the issue.
You are doing exactly the same thing, insisting that the number of workers required is somehow a definitive metric to demonstrate the inadequacy of nuclear power.
You are probably correct that the number of personnel needed to maintain a photovoltaic plant is lower. However, this alone proves nothing beyond that specific point.
If we aimed for a fully nuclear-powered economy, the numbers for electricity generation would indeed be what I've stated (between 1 and 0.7 people per MW). In addition, this number is hugely outsized for reasons of over-regulation, scalability, technology, etc. If nuclear power received at least one-tenth of the subsidies and from the flexibility of renewables, how would it rule out a landscape with new, less labor-intensive reactors? Most of the reactors in operation are very old, and technology changes come very late because of little investment and overregulation.
Regarding total solar energy generation, one must consider the entire cost of a smart grid, personnel for storage, etc. Additionally, solar panels have a much shorter lifespan compared to nuclear power plants, and we're dealing with vastly different volumes and quantities of materials (assuming we want to recycle every panel). Furthermore, the solar industry is significantly less transparent than the nuclear industry, including the number of people required for panel production and their working conditions. ( https://enduyghurforcedlabour.org/solar/ )
There are likely many other hidden costs that I haven't mentioned, which would further increase the prices and the number of required personnel. Therefore, if you want to continue debating on this basis, go ahead. However, I want to emphasize that even if renewables required more personnel than a nuclear power plant, the discussion would still be pointless for me. The number of people involved says very little about the technology itself or its future prospective.
And again, my point is not to choose nuclear over renewable. But rather why do people like you prefer to rule it out when the IPCC itself calls it necessary for decarbonization? I want to decarbonize in a diversified way, focus on all available technologies, do you?
When you litter this site with low-quality inflammatory comments where you call people a Marxist, accuse them of intellectual dishonesty, pure ideology, call them a paid shill etc that is fine.
When I call you out on that behavior that "nullifies my reasoning entirely" (???)
This site has high quality discussions in part of the higher level of effort people put in their comments. There are plenty of interesting arguments against my original comment! You could argue that labor costs may not continue to rise. Or you could argue that a large portion of the labor costs around nuclear are white-collar and could be reduced by using AI. Or you could argue that cost isn't everything and that a nuclear power program has several benefits for national security. I'd love to read a well-thought out response of any kind. Instead you wrote a huge list of low-quality points in every one of your responses. We all know that the manufacture of solar panels is evolving, and that nuclear can reduce carbon emissions, and that 1MW solar is not the same as 1MW nuclear, and that solar without batteries is not enough; similarly it should be obvious to anyone that maintaining a nuclear reactor is harder than maintaining a field of solar panels; commenting these things is a waste of everyone's time. Making twelve different tangentially-related points and offhand comments doesn't serve anyone. That is why I am frustrated.
I reinvite you to re-read the discussion. You are the one who started making completely unnecessary and inappropriate comments about my personal profile, and how I spend my time.
Besides all that, with every comment I have always been in the topic, I have always brought arguments. However, I consider the discussion closed.
Most of your comment is information-free, but I will respond to the single point you made. You mention the production, maintenance, and disposal of solar panels also require labor. Yes, obviously. Do you not realize that nuclear energy is far more labor-intensive per watt for each of those, or do you simply not care?
My argument is simple: labor costs will dominate for both battery-solar and nuclear; labor costs per watt are significantly higher for nuclear; thus as the cost of labor increases with time, nuclear fission will be increasingly unaffordable. If you want to debate that, please come armed with relevant facts, not vague statements and unrelated tangents.