It is very simple, nuclear has been a failure in Europe in the last couple of decades. Look at projects in the Finland, France and the UK. The situation would have been much better if there was a nuclear industry that could deliver in time and within budget.
A country like France with a massive amount of aging nuclear power plants is in serious trouble replacing them in time.
Fortunately, wind and solar are doing very well in reducing CO2 emissions. In the coming one or two decades, wind and solar can easily outpace nuclear in reducing CO2 emissions.
For aging nuclear power plants, keeping them running becomes more and more costly. So the question becomes, if we need to invest a big chunk of money, what should we invest in to reduce CO2 emissions the most.
And the answer is that building out wind/solar and insulating buildings is at the moment way more effective than keeping old nuclear power plants running.
Well, it's not really, if it was just about money all the research that went into renewables could be invested in other things and we could just keep burning cheap available coal. It's about stopping CO2 emissions and we need every drop of capacity we can get if we are to shutdown fossil fuel plants. Trying to eliminate both fossil fuel usage and nuclear at the same time is insane, and we are going to miss our already lax emission targets because we are taking on a handicap for no reason.
> And the answer is that building out wind/solar and insulating buildings is at the moment way more effective than keeping old nuclear power plants running.
This is already what we have been doing, and that's including that we can "make do" with energy savings.
It just doesn't close the gap. Nordics/northern europe need nuclear or equivalent power source to close the gap, or a revolution in energy storage.
I think we need more energy in the future, for all the green technology, not less. Energy is the currency, even more so than already, of the future economy.
The problem we have is that in the past decade fossil fuel was way to cheap. This has now changed, but ramping up production of solar and wind takes a while.
Fossil fuels are still way too cheap compared to storage of electricity. So there are lots of ways we could store electricity. But if you can't compete with a gas powered plant next door, it is not going to be built.
At the same time, if you look at power consumption of data centers, it is amazing that so much of that can be ad supported.
The proof is that nobody is investing in keeping old nuclear power plants open. All over Europe. When those plants stay open it is governments paying for it.
In contrast, companies are now paying money to rent a piece of sea to put a wind farm in.
Agree 100%, but this isn't in the context of one or the other, it's in the context of doing the maximum of both.
Sites that want nuclear and have the extra money for it should go forward full steam ahead, but current construction capability in both the US is extremely low. Even at maximum build capacity, neither the US nor Europe will be able to build at the pace they had in the 1970s. And as the 1970s-era reactors reach natural end of life, we won't be able to replace them as quickly as they leave the grid.
In contrast, renewables and storage deploy quickly, on time, and on budget, and the capacity for production is at least an order of magnitude larger than what we can do with nuclear.
This isn't an either/or, it's a "yes and" but it turns out that nuclear's contribution will be fairly small in comparison.
> In contrast, renewables and storage deploy quickly, on time, and on budget, and the capacity for production is at least an order of magnitude larger than what we can do with nuclear.
Yet EU energy crises keep getting worse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Could you be a bit more clear about your implication here?
Do you think the EU energy crisis is because of renewables somehow? If so, how did you come to that conclusion, and in what way?
Renewables don't generate any energy when they aren't connected to the grid. And natural gas shortages for heating don't really get solved by renewables unless people start installing lots of heat pumps, which they definitely should.
> It is very simple, nuclear has been a failure in Europe in the last couple of decades. Look at projects in the Finland, France and the UK. The situation would have been much better if there was a nuclear industry that could deliver in time and within budget.
What are the reasons for that failure? Has Europe had the same problem as the US of severe under-investment in infrastructure and withering capabilities? Is risk-aversion becoming pathological, leading to ballooning costs and complexity?
It seems to be a combination of nuclear becoming too high tech combined with not enough volume to maintain the technology.
Maybe its a scale thing. If you build only a few nuclear plants per decade, you can't iterate over designs. You may lose valuable knowledge, etc.
If I look at complex building projects in The Netherlands, it seems that beyond a certain complexity, companies just cannot come up with a design/plan to make it work.
For example, the Dutch government said, we want the biggest lock in the world (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluizen_van_IJmuiden#Bouw_nieu...). Not a controversial project, yet the winning concortium had a design that didn't work and had quite a few other problems.
On the other hand, windturbine designs iterate so quickly, that even floating turbines in rough sea is now economical.
> Fortunately, wind and solar are doing very well in reducing CO2 emissions. In the coming one or two decades, wind and solar can easily outpace nuclear in reducing CO2 emissions.
Germany has proved this is a huge lie.
Edit: to elaborate a bit, what it proves without surprise is that wind and solar can't significantly reduce CO2 without a clean baseline. By their very nature (not producing at night and without wind), and without some miraculous tech breakthrough, wind and solar can't be the major part of the mix for our developed societies, that's the hard reality of the orders of magnitudes involved here. So the question is what is the realistic plan for that baseline to complement solar and wind for at least 50% of the mix? Because the only options I see are A/Nuclear, B/Bet on imaginary storage tech, C/Bet on fusion becoming viable with decades earlier.
It's the other way around. Without wind and solar, Germany would produce a lot more CO2 than it produces today.
If you come from a situation where most electricity is generated from fossil fuel, with a bit of nuclear, than installing a bit of solar and wind trivially reduces CO2. Wind on the North Sea can trivially take 50% of all required electricity production.
It is the end game that is hard. With just solar and wind you can't go down to zero CO2 emission.
That said, it is not clear that you can go to zero CO2 with just nuclear. Unless you are massively overbuilding nuclear to deal with peakload.
The current problem is that no government has proposed a timeline when fossil fuel will be more expensive than storage (or than nuclear mixed with wind).
As long as fossil fuel is cheap, we will only see solar and wind, because those are currently cheaper than fossil.
Sorry but no this is not what I call “very much”, nor “very well” as GP said. If you look at all the fossil bars (don’t forget the gas that would be too easy) it further prove my point that Germany really failed this decade and the trajectory is not looking good.
Also for a reality check have a look at electricitymap.org when there is no wind and when it’s the night, I don’t see how ones could keep a straight face thinking they are doing good, this is the mix of the future for our cities.
Well, nuclear power plants are not every easy to build. It takes time, knowledge, and experience. US/UK/French experience slowly degraded after this extended period of nuclear hatred. Now, when NPPs are cool again, they realised they lost core competences!
Note how Russians never stopped building NPPs so they do manage to build on time and within budget.
A country like France with a massive amount of aging nuclear power plants is in serious trouble replacing them in time.
Fortunately, wind and solar are doing very well in reducing CO2 emissions. In the coming one or two decades, wind and solar can easily outpace nuclear in reducing CO2 emissions.