The energy markets in Europe are connected and the fastest growing source of energy is basically wind. Coal is shrinking at this point and the enthusiasm for building new gas plants is likewise melting away rapidly as their cost seems to be on the high side compared to clean energy solutions. It will take decades to get rid of both of course.
Sweden and Finland actually both have nuclear plants. Finland even built a new one recently. But in general, nuclear is on the way out in Europe as there is no political will to commit to building new plants across the continent. Older plants are shutting down one by one. France has a lot of aging nuclear plants and they don't seem to be building new ones and are actively considering shutting a few down (https://www.france24.com/en/20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...). Apparently keeping their existing capacity online would take tens/hundreds of billions and the political appetite for those investments is pretty low.
Many EU countries are on a path to completely clean energy and it does not seem to involve building new nuclear plants.
David MacKay covers this in his excellent book: https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml
As for political will I feel we should first start with the numbers and works out what adds up. If people don't want nuclear but nuclear is the only path to zero carbon then we'll need to choose one or the other.
Right now we can make great progress by ignoring nuclear because there's lots of things to be done. So go all in on renewables and ditch nuclear is a politically easy choice. Does great things for the stats and many people don't like nuclear. Will it take us all the way though?
I've not seen any figures which don't add up except ones which make some rather outrageous assumptions (e.g. no demand side management, no overproduction, intermittency stats based upon smaller, shittier turbines, etc.).
David Mackay's book is good but it's rather outdated - the figures are from 2006/2007 and renewables have plummeted so far in price since then that it rather changes the picture of what's achievable.
>So go all in on renewables and ditch nuclear is a politically easy choice.
I don't believe that's necessarily true. The nuclear lobby has spent a lot of money trying to make their choice politically easier.
The nascent renewables lobby, by contrast, doesnt' spend nearly as much on lobbying.
IMHO clean energy will take us a lot further than just our current base line needs because of these improvements. For example, right now people are reluctant to install air conditioning because of the cost of energy and concerns about global warming. Cheap, plentiful, clean energy changes that. If house owners can generate all the energy they need for a one time cost of installing batteries and solar, this concern goes away.
Hydrogen will be popular for things like heavy industry, shipping and other places where delivering large amounts of electricity cheaply is needed and batteries won't be good enough. These use cases are far fewer than most hydrogen fans hope/expect and IMHO excludes most forms of four wheel traffic on the road I don't see a business case for installing massive solar infrastructure when EV ranges are hitting 400+ miles already with rapidly improving recharge rates.
Most of that hydrogen will be generated using excess wind or solar and the business case for that will be that that energy is so cheap that the relative inefficiencies don't matter. It will have to compete with other synthetic fuels because at that point fossil fuels will be no longer be cost competitive with that either. Why buy barrels of oil at 50-100$ each when you can just convert kwh + water + air into carbohydrates?
Nuclear is on a slow but steady way out. At this point there are only a handful of countries investing in nuclear and quite a few have non technical reasons for this (i.e. military ones). R&d progress has been glacial and cost is an order of magnitudes from being competitive in the current market already. In most places that still have nuclear, it's one of the most expensive options in the market and there are a lot of nuclear plants at risk of shutting down early because of it.
IMHO fusion might still happen in half a century or so. By then most countries will have shut down all remaining coal, gas, and nuclear plants. At that point it will have to be super cheap to be off interest.
They are still in the process of building it, and it is set to become the second most expensive building built in modern times. [0]
[0] https://metropolitan.fi/entry/olkiluoto-ol3-second-most-expe...
It should be reduce carbon no matter the dollar cost, right?
It's utterly delusional to think that low density generation such as solar or wind can meet the growing energy needs without covering vast areas.
And electric vehicles will just increase the need.
The point is that nuclear is expensive. You get more energy per dollar by building renewables.
(and for the same reason, we should be looking at expanding hydro and geothermal)
So while I definitely think we should build solar and wind, it's ridiculous to just dismiss nuclear out of hand for cost reasons if the goal is 100% clean energy (unless you have, say, massive amounts of hydro power).
Given the climate emergency, it's silly to pit one clean energy project against another when in fact we need all we can get. Particularly in the case of variable renewables, as they benefit tremendously from being in a source-diverse power grid.
What do you mean by this?
Yes, some tiny European countries can rely on hydro or geothermal for baseline generation. Most countries can’t, and even if they’re a net exporter, they’re heavily dependent on fossil fuels (or nuclear) for filling in gaps.
Battery technology is nowhere near sufficient for the need, things like pumped storage are space intensive, and exotic stuff like hydrogen and molten sodium and whatnot are decades off. Something has to fill the gap. Nuclear is a good choice.
I expect more nuclear to be shut down than being delivered during that time. It's not a growth market.
20-30 years from now, several countries are planning to be 100% on renewables and most of those are not planning to build any new nuclear plants. Most of the remaining countries will be making similar plans in the next ten years.
I think it's even longer than that, unfortunately... of course, it depends how much over capacity you have, but those cold fronts in N Europe can kill wind speed for weeks on end sometimes IIRC. It is a huge problem for us to solve.
It's a huge problem in terms of time and finance but not a difficult technological one.
Because of the long winters, to do the same with wind/solar will require about 3-5 times as much cost as you might think at first. You need to provide extra capacity to artificially increase effective capacity factor, and then you need about 48 hours of storage. Also possible, but about the same price, is hydrogen for seasonal storage for winter.
...and generally speaking, effectively any carbonfree project being built now needs to be supported. We need everything. Including a lot more off-shore wind.