Comment by jama211 13 hours ago
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
I obviously don't know about Norway, but in most developed countries, the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure. While I can't prove it, it seems too convenient that people suddenly care about "nature" right after they've fucked it up for so many other reasons.
You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload oriented combined cycle plants).
Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-s...
> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload.
Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.
If the goal is 100% carbon-free energy, then we simply can't let economics get in the way. Otherwise we will always be stuck building some natural gas peaker plants.
And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices down even further via economics of scale and then run them uneconomically.
Uneconomically doesn't mean "at a loss", just that you aren't making as much profit as you could optimally. With enough economics of scale, we can probably still run these nuclear plants at a profit, maybe even cheaper than natural gas peakers. But it doesn't matter, the goal is saving the planet, not profit.
It's not the only option, you can also build massive amounts of wind/solar/tidal and pair them with massive amounts of battery storage.
The third option is to build way more hydro power plants. Hydro tends to get overlooked as a form of green energy, because while it might be 100% renewable, you do have to "modify" a local ecosystem to construct a new dam. But hydro has the massive advantage that it can work as both baseload and demand load, so they can pair nicely with wind/solar/tidal.
I'm not even talking about pumped hydro (though, that's a fourth option to consider). Regular hydro can work as energy storage by simply turning the turbines off at letting the lakes fill up whenever there is sufficient power from your other sources.
Yeah, I'm just arguing that "baseload" should be understood to be a bad thing in my comment above.
If you want to argue that nuclear is affordable as non-baseload power, because the (non-economic) cost to the environment of the alternatives is otherwise too high.... well I'd disagree because of how far solar/wind/batteries have come in the last couple of years, but prior to that you would have had a point. And you still would as far as continuing to operate existing plants goes of course.
Nuclear power has a massive handicap that most R&D was abandoned back in the 80s because it was uneconomic. And another handicap that the R&D it did get was never that focused on economics, commercial nuclear power were always a side effect of the true goal (Small reactors for nuclear submarines and Breeder reactors for nuclear weapons). And to get the promised low costs, you really need to commit and take advantage of massive economics of scale.
I'm not arguing that when taking environmental damage into account, that nuclear is cheaper than current solar/wind/battery technology for any single power project. They have the advantage of massive R&D over the last 30 years.
What I am arguing is that focusing on solar/wind/battery might not be the best route to 100% carbon free power in the long term. Maybe it is? But we really shouldn't be jumping to that assumption.
And we shouldn't be disregarding Nuclear because of any argument that can be summed up in a hacker news comment.
... voters (or however we want to handwave preference aggregation) are very passive about carbon-free energy (and global warming and sustainability and economics and ...)
they either pick some pet peeves (coral reefs, rainforests, global South inequality, desertification) and usually start buying things (EVs, PV panels, heat pumps)
but when it comes to policy they usually revert to Greenpeace/degrowth/NIMBY cult members
As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means.
But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.
It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
> It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1]
The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world.
Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4]
1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continu...
2. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-gene...
4.https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-b...
just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60).
That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".
That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants... https://www.nrdc.org/bio/rachel-fakhry/myth-247365-power-pla...
This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much rarer to have an extended period of cloud cover and no wind than an extended period of cloud cover, and an extended period without wind. Compound that with "over the entire electrical grid" and it doesn't happen.
And as a worst case version where the geographical and types-of-power constraints exist... e.g. if you're planning an off grid facility which is too small to justify wind power... backup generators exist.
The report mentions this:
> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply.
My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid.
> In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at this 97% benchmark is $104/MWh. This is already 22% lower than the $132/MWh estimate based on global average capital costs of solar and battery a year earlier. It is also more cost-effective than coal in many regions ($118/MWh) and far cheaper than nuclear ($182/MWh).
I guess, but this article seems misleading to me then. The percentages do seem to mean to constant 1GW supply, not a total supply.
So what’s the total supply?
LV is ~9 Gwh per day (3.3Twh year according to internets), so 23ish Gwh does seem promising, but they don’t have near that much solar I don’t think.
I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group. They just shut down that solar thermal electric plant after all. While that’s different than photovoltaics I know, it’s also true no grand plan survives implementation.
The point is that a very mundane setup with small storage is nearly enough to create a flat baseload of electricity.
We both know that neither supply nor demand is that flat.
In reality we can also trivially add wind power, existing hydro, gas turbines ran on carbon neutral fuel etc. to the mix.
How will you force this house that is self-sufficient 97% of the time to buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity and to not crater the capacity factor of the nuclear plant?
Because fast to deploy in theory fights quickly with permitting systems and NIMBYism. You need more permits, because a typical solar or wind farm doesn't come close to a nuclear plan's output, so the per-project bureaucracy multiplies. By needing more places, you also have more groups opposing projects for typical NIMBY reasons. You need battery facilities too, and more updates to the grid to deal with having less inertia, and the updates cost money, and the battery facilities themselves face more NIMBYism: Minimum distances to places where people live and such. So when you put it all together, slow bureaucracies just move at glacial paces, and the equipment you would have bought when you sent out the permit is already different than what you want to use when the permitting is approved.
Then we have the tariffs, as Europe puts tariffs on Chinese equipment that change the price quite a bit.
A country that took this very seriously and decided to put renewables as a top priority could go quite fast. But if there's anything one should learn about the last few decades is that modern democracies care too much about vested interest and NIMBY complaints to actually get projects like this done. Just look at charts showing power waiting to go online in most countries: You'll find very long lines, even after dealing with the rest of the the bureaucratic gauntlet.
One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters.
First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the summer. Wind is an option, but NIMBYism makes that hard as Europe doesn't have as much empty space as the US.
The other thing is heating: in Europe around 64% of residential energy use goes to space heating Vs 42% in the US. And the majority of that comes from gas. So to go carbon neutral, you actually need to greatly increase electricity demand. This is why Europe is pushing for new homes to be really well insulated.
I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism
Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you
Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill"
I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself
Isn't that exactly what NIMBY means?
People want the power to stay on but they don't want the power generation built near them.
The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.
It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.
> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.
Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
You need a reliable source for energy. Pumped storage is not. They are mostly good for dealing with the fluctuations of energy supply and demand. It crucially requires water to operate. You can't do much when there's a drought. Also, did some googling. The world’s largest pumped‑hydro storage plant (Fengning, China) stores nearly 40 GWh, delivering 3.6 GW for about 10.8 hours when full. Thats not even a day.
There are really three options for reliable baseload: coal, gas, nuclear. Pick your poison.
> The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage.
We already do that. France notably has a lot of hydropower and they pump water up when they don’t want to shutdown a nuclear unit.
The issue is that there is very little places where you could build new dams in Europe and water shortage is becoming a regular occurrence.
> Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.
It's also the oldest storage tech and I doubt there's a single place in Europe available to build more.
> Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
The whole EU is in winter weather together.
> Sure, it might cost more
I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will).
However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons:
2. It will take longer
3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles
4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well.
Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.
> It will take longer
Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
All around Europe nuclear plants are forced off the markets because the electricity prices are for weeks lower than their wear and tear and fuel costs.
Why should someone with rooftop solar and a battery buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity from the grid when they can make their own?
”Baseload” is a title earned by having the lowest marginal costs. There is nothing fundamental about it.
Today renewables have the cheapest marginal cost at 0. They are the new ”baseload”.
This is not true. I assume you are talking about the french nuclear reactors and their abysmal capacity factors?
The reason for the french case is that they were required to reduce output to allow more space for other new energy generation types. Fortunately the French have realised the error of their ways.
> economically
When we're talking about societal public investment - even investment in the private sector - capital cost is a much more constrained consideration than anything related to abstract market "competitiveness". The latter does not influence the former in real terms (only in argumentative policy terms, which are unfortunately more impactful than they should be).
> Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?
Longer than nuclear to do what? I was replying to the above commenter who said the following:
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables
TTL for individual nuclear is obviously always much longer than for renewables but time to any arbitrary large generation goal is almost certainly shorter for nuclear (barring taboo).
You're wasting your energy on that user, I suspect.
> No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts
...is commonly a rhetorical pattern meaning "I've predetermined my conclusion, but I want to save face by appearing rational and casting those I disagree with as biased or incompetent in one fell swoop."
It's the "Aren't there any REAL men anymore?" of contentious topics.
There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables.
Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.
And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy.
Plus it is a huge nice target in war times.
There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.
If Germany invested all their renewable money into nuclear, they would be carbon-neutral today. Not by 2050 but today.
Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price.
The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.
No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T.
Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
France has 58 reactors with combined power of 60GW. The audit in 2011 (after Fukushima) estimated their cost at 96B euros and the total investment into the nuclear industry since 1950 including research at 228B euros.
And that doesn't include the fact that for all these years electricity prices in Germany were higher than in France which helped to keep renewables afloat.
> But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
That's yet to be seen, doesn't really match the reality I observe so far. They are promised to be cheaper sure, but you end paying more and subsidizing coal power plants in China along the way.
> Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power.
Germany has just over 250GW of installed capacity. [0] indicates peak power is 75GW. Replicating the Olkiluoto EPR build for 75GW of capacity would have cost perhaps 500B EUR.
[1] speculates about what would have happened if Germany had retained its nuclear power stations and performed a fleet build-out.
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-industry-has-lar...
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
Citing [1] means that you are only here to sow discord citing research you know is factually wrong.
That study is laughably bad. To the point that they double counted all renewable investment.
See: https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/en/blog/2024/kritische-stellun...
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Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
Alternatively, renewables have the massive advantage of being distributed and often closer to the consumer, possibly even their rooftop, or their parking space, or even on top of their shading device (big umbrellas etc.), or their agricultural land, which is already suffering from the higher temperatures.
And price and time to market are of course giant points as well.
Even with that, renewables are cheaper.
One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you.
Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
> Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
You can't manage a winter load with batteries (and no country on earth does it), batteries would need a 100x improvement for that purpose.
With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of).
In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
Who the actually cares about cheaper I want better and more reliable
Can we please stop optimizing everything into low quality low reliability garbage for the sake of being cheaper?
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have.
I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).
The answer to this is just "intermittent" : the higher the share of renewables, the higher the share that you have to make up for when you're at night without wind. This can be done through batteries, water storage, or interconnection, but that's the real cost of renewables.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
That, as well as intermittency being difficult to manage.
Nuclear+gas is the cleanest solution.
(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong)
1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year
1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.
Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.
Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.
Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local.
Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.
> Sure, it might cost more
That.
There are reasons why the cost rises if you lack other base and reactive generation to balance out the grid as you then need over production and storage. But in the end that's about cost
Spiking electricity prices will lose you an election
There are a few things:
1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has).
2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale.
3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China?
4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.
Yes? Any sort of system that generates power... can generate lots of power if there's more of that system.
What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere. Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas.
The regulations and the subsidies ought to be removed though, let the market decide. Solar or Nuclear will win if it's better, and that might be a per-area contest.
ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space.
Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.
There's plenty for a few thousand years. We might have solved fusion power by then.
Can’t speak to other localities, but in the US, every additional project multiplies headaches with red tape, bureaucracy, cronyism, ideologically opposed politicians, sham environmental groups puppeted by incumbents, nearby residents taking issue with the project for whatever reason, etc. getting one project off the ground and landed safely is a monumental effort, let alone multiple.
I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear.
People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?
No. It’s as simple as:
A) battery tech isn’t good enough or clean enough
…and…
B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times)
You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear.
Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it with renewables. Renewables only scale by using up a crap ton of fossil fuels to mine the materials and factory produce the equipment and ship it around the globe. Nuclear runs steady and practically forever off material that fits in a small box.
Ultimately, we need both. As China has already realized.
It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear.
For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal.
There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...)
You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though:
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-ene...
Yes, this is the real answer. Nuclear, which is currently dropping as a percentage of global electricity demand and is now under 10% needs a miracle to reverse that and maybe reach 15% if everything goes well for it.
Meanwhile renewables are surging and every relevant expert suggests they'll dominate the future.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-is-gettin...
The graph without the relatively flat hydro is even more stark.
The stuff people say about nuclear on this forum is on the level of flat earthism and they seem totally unashamed of this.
> Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers
Well no, storage would need another 100x improvement for being usable in a 100% renewable scenario in any country you have any sort of winter.
Say what you want on nuclear but we have example of countries which managed it successfully, for renewables, we still haven't.
Which is entering emergency reserve territory. Nuclear power CAPEX to build an emergency reserve would seem to be utterly insane.
The easy solution is gas turbines. We already have them and as aviation and maritime shipping decarbonize utilize the same fuel. Whether that is syngas, ammonia or biofuels.
Or earmark the biofuels for grid usage. Today the US produces enough ethanol used as a blend in for gasoline to run the grid without help for 14 days.
As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
This turns out not to be the case, and all these supposedly "externalized" costs are actually included in the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors.
For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).
Wrong on both counts.
The only wrinkle is that when the German government made electricity production from nuclear power illegal, it had to take over some of those responsibilities, for obvious reasons.
It also took over the money that had been saved up thus far, which is almost certainly more than needed to cover the costs. Well unless those costs are driven up to infinity with ever more creative mechanisms by politicians.
But that's a political problem.
Finland just built a site for around €1 billion.
Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed.
This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.
EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.