It's clear these challenges don't nessesarially make Nuclear expensive when you look at France. They have the highest mix of Nuclear by some margin and the cheapest power in Western Europe.
The problem seems to be that 'we' don't know how to build nuclear reactors anymore. France has to replace their aging nuclear powerplants in the next few decades. But building a new one proves to be very difficult.
It is not clear to me what changed. There have been a few accidents. But Chernobyl is mostly unrelated to current reactors. Fukushima is of course more annoying but it doesn't explain why so many current projects that try build a nuclear powerplant are failing.
I suspect nuclear did as well as it did, in the past, because it was viewed as a thing that the best people should work on. Now, it's viewed as a backwater, or even a dead end. This won't attract the same kind of people.
France doesn't have the cheapest power in Europe. Even for non-households, they are beaten by a large margin by the likes of Denmark - where wind is the biggest source of generation. And household consumers pay pretty much the average European price for electricity. [1]
If you want to look at France, google the most recent French attempt to add nuclear capacity - Flamanville 3. It's 15 years late and nearly 6 times over budget and still not operational.
Indeed. This 'success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it.
In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 10.3% of gridpower in 2017).
Curious. Denmark has either the 2nd highest or the 4th lowest power prices in Europe depending on whether we're talking about household or non-household users.
There must be something strange going on there beyond just having wind power, that is a huge divergence. Driven mainly by taxes I see.
edit: Sorry - I missed your last sentence on first reading - so yes it's taxes.
Danmark is a huge outlier in terms of how much it taxes household electricity consumption. Including VAT, nearly 70% of a Danish household electricity is tax. Non-households are taxed much more lightly. This is a policy decision I guess to encourage more efficient utilisation.
But the actual wholesale cost of electricity in Denmark is very low because of their use of cheap wind power.
I don't have anything more up-to-date than this[1] which is for 2019 but the second page shows a bar graph where the level of tax on household electricity is shown.
Heavy French nuclear subsides separate the cost of electricity from what consumers are paying. It’s not obvious what’s going on because their nuclear generation is done by the government which doesn’t need to balance the books.
