Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 12, 2026 17:46 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them) by anselm
Parent article: FOSS in times of war, scarcity, and AI

The biggest problem with nuclear is that it's still a heat engine, and just building the heat engine parts of the power plant (i.e. the external steam loop, turbines, and cooling system) is more expensive than equivalent renewable energy. Even if the actual reactor were free- and they're obviously far from it- and it still wouldn't be able to compete on cost with renewable energy. That's today. Renewable energy (including battery storage) is still getting cheaper, so its competitive advantage over nuclear is only going to grow.

Of course renewable energy isn't perfect. It still has problems, and there are probably specific applications where other technologies have non-cost advantages that outweigh renewables' cost advantage. There's also no good reason to stop using nuclear plants that are already paid for and are running well. But we're now at the point that plans for new and replacement, non-renewable power plants need to include a justification for not using renewables instead.

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Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 12, 2026 18:04 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> But we're now at the point that plans for new and replacement, non-renewable power plants need to include a justification for not using renewables instead.

The justification for nuclear is "it's not carbon". So much of this carbon-neutral is exactly that - crap. When you burn anything the question should be "how long ago was the sunlight I'm releasing locked up?". Anything more that 100 years or so should be a red flag (nuclear doesn't count here - that's releasing ancient starlight :-)

Renewables, it's possibly measured in hours, which is great. Wood, of course, while not a particularly good fuel in many ways, is measured mostly in a century or two (or less). Coal and oil are adding to the CO2 burden, and from my knowledge of what's going on, I think we passed the point of no return quite a while back. I suspect Khim may be right in saying Europe will be going back to the 17th century, but on current performance I suspect the rest of the world will be joining us!

Cheers,
Wol

Maybe that's enough

Posted Feb 12, 2026 19:41 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Can we agree that this has wandered pretty far off-topic, even for an article like this one? Energy issues are certainly of great interest, but we'll not solve them on LWN.