this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Ftfy
While renewable sources are awesome, they are still not as reliable as the other solutions. You still need a baseline to keep your grid up at night, when the wind wanes or during droughts (depending on your renewable source of choice). Nuclear is the next best thing. Low CO2, safe and cheap in the long run. If everyone in the EU was as commited to nuclear as countries like France, Finland and Belgium are we could get reliably cheap power everywhere, which would be an amazing asset for our future industrial growth!
The wind always blows somewhere. Diversification of locations across a country or ideally across Europe minimizes reliability issues. The rest can be covered by investment in storage technologies.
Meanwhile constructing nuclear plants would be a 30+ year approach (not even solution) to a <10 year problem, if it could even be done. And that's highly doubtful, if you look at the massive problems e.g. France has with maintaining it's aging plants, Britain has with the Hinkley Point C project (built by french experts that should have the necessary routine - this is not a matter of lack of experience) and so on.
30+ year approach? Where is that coming from? The median construction time for a nuclear reactor is 89 months, or 7,5 years. And it's not like we are only going to need it now either, our civilization is going to need reliable power sources for the foreseeable future, so why settle with alternatives that can only barely cover our needs now and need to be replaced with fossil fuels when not available, when a much cleaner option (that being nuclear) remains a possibility?
That somewhere will also need power, though. Not to mention, building interconnections across nations is an arduous task that requires time and financing on its own. According to the European Commission the current objective is reaching a 15% interconnection capacity by 2030 (meaning every member state should be able to export up to 15% of its capacity). And only 16 of 27 countries are on track with that objective. Sure, going forward with this will be great and very much necessary, but we cannot rely solely on interconnections, even when thinking 10 years from now.
Let's take last night as an example: here are the electricity map data for Germany. At midnight, despite having an enormous renewable capacity installed, the wind was evidently pretty low and of course solar was of little use, so they still had to fire up their coal, gas and biomass generators.
As this was going on, neighbouring Austria and Netherlands were doing great, with respectively 85% and 71% of their grids being powered by renewables, but unfortunately this wasn't nearly enough for power hungry Germany.
In the meantime, France, despite only using 24% of renewables in its mix, managed to get the 4th lowest carbon intensity on our continent and the 7th worldwide, with a carbon intensity over 10 times better than that of Germany.
Some day, sure. But we need reliable and clean energy now, not in the distant future. So the first step is improving our grids today, then when the technology allows it we can phase out nuclear too, and move to a fully renewable grid. But that simply cannot happen right now.
Exactly! That is why renewable energy (+storage) is the only solution a they are both significantly quicker to build up and significantly cheaper than nuclear already and getting ever more competitive, while the running costs for nuclear have been at the same relatively high level for ages.
You can see right on the screenshot 57% renewables with wind being the biggest source of electricity. That means by adding 75% more renewables Germany would be able to support itself. The reason Germany sucks so badly at this is that it uses coal instead of gas. Gas power plants have a third of the emissions of a coal power plant per kWh. In terms of share of low carbon electricity Germany is doing alright and is building a lot recently. Since Germany has coal power plants instead of gas ones for the most part, it also means Germany is replacing those coal power plants. So this should go down quickly.
Also battery storage is growing extremly quickly in Germany and the rest of the plan is hydrogen in gas power plants for dunkelflaute. However at current rate Germany should have an electricity system as clean as France within a decade. The built up numbers for renewables are strong enough for that and we are talking about nearly 60% renewable electricity production last year already.
France has had a huge nuclear crisis in the last couple years with a rather long times half of the power plants being down due to technical issues. The UK is currently having 6 out of 9 npps down.
Yes, the German "Energiewende" is actually well thought through. The only fuckup was the reliance on russian gas, that put a damper on it.
Nuclear is the only solution for sustainable energy production. Unless we somehow revolutionize power storage, there is no other renewable means for mass-scale energy production with as little environment impact as Nuclear.
Solar at that scale would take up millions of acres only to be beaten by a rainy day. Wind turbines are notoriously unreliable, often don't last for very long, and can't be fully recycled. Not to mention they're ugly.
All the rest depend on your countries natural resources, and often force countries out of energy independence.
Nuclear is quick to develop (see parent comment source), safer than any other form of energy production, produces the least pollutants (see previous link), and takes up the smallest land area.
It's pretty obvious that Nuclear is the future.
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Nuclear is much more expensive than renewables, and it's so stable and reliable that France has been importing a significant amount of power from Germany in the past two years because they couldn't properly cool their nuclear reactors.
Not to mention how most new nuclear projects go significantly above budget and take much longer to finish than originally planned.