this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
140 points (94.3% liked)
World News
31889 readers
330 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Funny how you equate 1+1=2 with the fairy tales totally unironically talked about regarding nuclear power and renewables constantly.
The simple truth is: Countries in Europe planning to build nuclear are failing their energy transition right now. Because none is building enough capacity to cover just the minimal base load for the projected demand in ~2 decades (that will massively increase because of electrification/decarbonisation). Why don't they plan enough? Because no one knows how to even foot that bill. (PS: France is close if they actually build 14 new big reactors... not the 6 they are openly talking about with 8 optional ones - the full set of 14. But even in basically THE nuclear country in Europe you can't tell the population honestly how massive the required investions are.) That is actually simply math...
I agree with the "simple truth" EU governments are planning infrastructure based on profitability and not on actual needs. The result is that coal use will continue to increase, renewables will be "scaled back" and a few thousand people will get richer in exchange for the destruction of the environment and eventually massive die-offs of not only plants and animals, but humans too.
When you are a government, the "bill" doesn't actually matter. The amount of money building a nuclear reactor costs is trivial compared to the size of these economies. Germany is almost 5trillion, France is almost 3trillion. If a nuclear raector after all it's cost overruns and other shit cost 1Billion a year for 10years to build that is 1/3rd of %0.01 of Frances GDP. The money exists, the prioritization does not.