> Germany is specially interesting. They have on the forefront of green revolution. I can't even remember the amount of think pieces hailing Germany as this amazing government lead push to green energy. Germany was held up as the global model over and over. The amount of times I have heard talk about German investment in solar is almost mind-blowing.

Unfortunately the last two cabinets (8 years) did a poor job in continuing a most promising change to more renewable energies. The business lobbying that took place at that time is unbearable.

This graphic[1] (in german, but you get the idea) shows the expansion figures for renewable energies and it is clearly visible how photovoltaics in particular have been severely limited since 2013. Absurd rules were created, for example a levy for privately generated photovoltaic electricity. Or artificially created requirements to keep plant sizes small.

After laws were changed in favour of large investors, fossil energy companies now adorn themselves with large projects, although a large part of the expansion is still done by private individuals.

After an entire industry has been destroyed, there are now complaints that there is a lack of skilled workers and that the number of new installations cannot be increased quickly enough. It all makes me want to puke. We could be somewhere completely different today, but greed and lust for power prevent us from doing anything good for the general public.

[1]: https://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/EE/Redaktion/DE/Bilder/G...

> Absurd rules were created, for example a levy for privately generated photovoltaic electricity.

This makes sense since you stress the grid requiring the grid operators to invest.

No, you misunderstand. This is a tax on electricity, unless consumed in the immediate vicinity.

It applies of you build the solar farm and the power line yourself. And did normal grid, in addition to grid fees.

Not really. It's how I thought it worked since that's how it works pretty much everywhere they have this same issue. You stress the grid by offloading your excess electricity to the grid. Now they have to dispose of it somehow and this costs money. The problem arises because lots of people are offloading their excess electricity at the exact same times so nobody needs it really. It's a victim of its own success haha.

1-1 net metering just isn’t a viable model. It sounds nice from the perspective of someone installing solar on their house, but it doesn’t make sense at a grid scale and it has meant that most home solar installations are just distributed power plants instead of being energy independent. The only thing that really makes fiscal sense for the utility provider is being paid/paying the current price for electricity at whatever time they send/receive power. Unfortunately for people with solar panels, this means getting paid less when selling and paying more when buying, as everyone else with solar panels is selling their excess electricity and buying electricity at the same times. Even with that price spread, it may make sense for power companies to charge a high connection fee or higher than retail rates for power to solar generating customers because they aren’t paying for the infrastructure they need when they are selling power like someone who buys all their power from the grid would.

I agree with this. In principle the solar panel owners are taking all the profits while socializing all the costs, which is good for them but it's not a fair system. Unfortunately by the time the lawmakers realized their "mistake", the solar panel owners had already gotten used to this system and as we all know... Nobody likes paying taxes/levies that reduce their income.

> Greenpeace

Reminder that Greenpeace started out fighting against nuclear weapons and their testing (which so annoyed the French government that they simply murdered an activist) and nuclear dumping, both of which put considerable quantities of radioactive material into the air and water.

Chernobyl has been in the news again since the site was occupied by Russian troops. That and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla... have apparently taken shelling damage but as yet no leaks have been reported. The potential for an accidental or deliberate disaster that covers Western Europe with radioactive material and takes out a season's agriculture remains.

Is everyone happy with Iran having a buildout of a dozen or more reactors to replace their oil usage?

More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

> Reminder that Greenpeace started out fighting

That may be, but the simple reality is that they and many like them have been fearmongering against nuclear for decades while being far more accepting of coal and case.

> Is everyone happy with Iran having a buildout of a dozen or more reactors to replace their oil usage?

I am. Iran would have had peaceful French built nuclear power with French handling nuclear bringing nuclear fuel and taking nuclear 'waste' home.

This was agree on by Iran and France. However the US in its infinite wisdom prevented that.

And then when Iran said, if France was not gone do it, they would do it themselves. The US and Israel basically fell over themselves claiming this was prove that Iran was building nuclear weapons.

> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

That's not a law of nature. Its an act of deliberate policy and history.

> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

Comparing Nuclear and Solar cost is like comparing the cost of rain to the cost tap water. It is fundamentally stupid.

- Nuclear provides a stable continuous source of power and matches existing power grid.

- Solar need more than three time the capacity for the same level of power, need profound infrastructure changes and required to be associated with Lithium Storage or/and Power2Gas or/and water pump storage.

> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

France has been able in 20 years to create out of nowhere more than 30 nuclear power plants covering more than 50% of the country energy needs for a fraction of the cost of an EPR today. Privatisation, loss of Engineering knowledge and mainly lack of politics support are the element to blame here. Not nuclear energy itself.

> Reminder that Greenpeace started out fighting against nuclear weapons and their testing

Good. Then they should stick to their fundamental and go protest a bit against Nuclear weapon testing in North Korea. That will make them much more relevant that when they do support the construction of (Russian provided) coal and gaz power plants in Germany.

Sticking to their fundamental might have helped to prevent the shit show we are now in: now Germany cannot even afford to stop few Gaz pipelines from Russia without putting the country in the dark.

It is unclear how much nuclear energy costs to the public in France. There is no cost transparency so I don't know what you base that on.

> There is no cost transparency so I don't know what you base that on.

Electricity cost to the final user is the only metrics that matter.

Anything in the energy market is heavily subsidies: petrol, gas, RNG, everything, not only nuclear.

France was having one of the lowest electricity price in Europe for more than 2 decades mainly due to Nuclear[^1]. This is not anymore due to the European common energy market.

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/59f1e791-...

> Electricity cost to the final user is the only metrics that matter.

By that logic the difference between solar and nuclear doesn't matter since the cost is the same.

The fact of the matter is that we don't know the cost of nuclear in France since it gets lumped together with other profits/losses. This is unfortunate because it makes comparing very difficult. The claims you made are therefore unsubstantiated.

The cost of nuclear energy is actually in the law since EDF has to sell some of its production at cost to other providers. The evaluation is done by the CRE.

What did France use for the other half of its energy? Why didn't it just use nuclear for everything?

Why does the answer to those questions make your claims about renewables needing storage nonsensical?

> What did France use for the other half of its energy? Why didn't it just use nuclear for everything?

Energy is was more than 70% nuclear in France. The rest is mainly hydro, solar when available and a bit of Gas [1]. Some reactors were built before and after this 20 years nuclear rush, this is why 50% in my previous message.[^2]

[1]: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/regional-data#producti...

[2]: https://twitter.com/superbello123/status/1505287449995579396

Okay, so your comment was less correct than I assumed.

France peaked around 75% of electricity from nuclear. Energy is bigger than just electricity and generally includes transport and fuel for home and industrial heating, which puts Framce back around a half of energy from clean sources.

This 75% of electricity is (perhaps not coincidentally) very close to the 80% that many people feel modern renewables can provide without any major storage issues. Because that 20/25% leeway means you can just use fossil backup to fill any gaps where your clean supply doesn't match your demand.

But, the anti-renewable types who point to nuclear to justify their outdated opinions on renewables never seem to care that nuclear was only ever part of a larger system. They meticulously count every penny spent on grid upgrades and storage for one, but not the other. Pumped hydro and nuclear is a classic combination for decades.

They'll attack time-of-use pricing as some kind of attack on liberty even though its a standard thing to do with excess nuclear capacity overnight, in places like France, for example.

Use various energy sources to be rock solid. Anyway it's balanced in Europe rather than in France.

Not only that, the potential risk that contemporary nuclear energy (worse yet, older tech) keeps increasing as the world becomes more complex. You could make a list very very long by jotting down the threats that would be caused by and directed at a nuclear installation of any size.

Frankly, I don't trust the Human to manage the risk of a nuclear installation. Look what Humans are doing elsewhere in every other domain. We don't need the sun to be brought to Earth.

This is quite simply contradicted by evidence. And newly built nuclear plant would be incredibly safe. And if we actually build really modern plants they would be absurdly safe.

People make way to big a deal of how amazingly complex nuclear plants are. Its not some magical spell that prevents demons from entering the world.

And the potential of accidents even in case of terrorist attack (or whatever fantasy scenario) is far smaller then people want to claim.

But OP isn't talking about newly-built plants. OP is doing what many pro-nuclear folks do, which is to posit a counterfactual history where we built dozens (hundreds?) of nuclear plants in the 70s. That would leave us with many, many obsolete nuclear plants reaching the end of their intended lifespan all at once over the last few years. (Nuclear plants were typically permitted to operate for 40 years, although may have successfully applied for extensions and continue to run today.)

They were not "permitted" to run 40 years, they were planned for at least 40 years, that's completely different.

Any time extension is a tradeoff, there's nothing wrong with extending the lifespan if the regulators are okay with it.

It looks like I was imprecise with my language. It looks like plants are licensed for 40 years. Extensions are for an additional 20 years. (!)

> there's nothing wrong with extending the lifespan if the regulators are okay with it.

Perhaps! Unless regulators make a mistake, or are pressured politically or by industry to extend licenses when they ought not be. I'm not sure I'd want to go into a hypothetical 2030s where the US had scores of nuclear power plants to decommission two decades after the end of their original lifespan.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21

The risks _are_ managed. Pretty much every reactor in existence has a negative void coefficient (the more the reactor heats up, the more it is moderated, lowering total energy production, hence lowering heat, etc.) Pretty much every reactor in existence is in failsafe: if power or control is lost, rods close, reaction stops. Pretty much every reactor in existence is not powered by its own output: if your reactor starts going wild for any reason, it won't be able to keep itself powered up. You shut off the small generator outside (and by outside, I mean it is physically _outside_ the reactor building), and it stops. Pretty much every reactor in existence has walls solid enough to block a plane crashing into it. Hell, Zaporizhzhya has been shelled repeatedly and is doing... fine. (As in, the reactor, not necessarily the people).

So, no, nuclear energy is about the safest means of producing energy we have today. Offsetting environmental damage to third world countries to mine your rare earth minerals for solar does not get to make you feel better about it. Nuclear installations are not handled like a shitty startup that goes "wE'Re AgIlE wE'lL dEaL WiTh iT iN tImE". The IAEA is absurdly stringent on their requirements. The ASN in France puts such harsh conditions and requires every crucial safety equipment to be not just doubled, but tripled. There is no domain in which we are more demanding.

>>There is no domain in which we are more demanding.

Interesting perspective of relative risks in life. Makes me think of Boeing's 737MAX that should have gone through a new type certification process and was instead allowed (by regulators in multiple countries) to apply software to make it seem like it flies like other 737s. This saved on pilot retraining costs, and resulted in a couple mass deaths. We don't seem to be coherent with risks.

The death toll of nuclear energy is only a minute fraction of the casualties brought about by coal and oil. The most pessimistic estimations of deaths caused by all nuclear power accidents that ever occurred and waste that has been produced utterly pale in comparison to the insane human cost of the fossil fuels. And thanks to their greenhouse gas emissions the worst of it is likely yet to come. And the sun generates its energy output as a result of nuclear fusion, not the nuclear fission of a chain reaction. We'd very much like to bring the sun to earth because controlled sustained fusion could potentially solve the majority of our energy troubles. Unfortunately thus far we've brought it in the form of thermonuclear weapons.

> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.

In practical terms: solar panels might cost less per peak W, same for inverters, same for batteries but costs to reach self-sufficiency for real [1] are still simply absurdly expensive in both absolute capex terms and expected operational life.

Actually I have a small p.v. with lithium storage as a guarantee for blackouts, not counting the battery in monetary terms I'll pay it back thanks to self consumption, I can shift most big loads in the sunny days etc, but not all. A battery big enough to ensure full operation in comfort conditions (witch means being able to heat the house in winter, cook something in early morning or in the evening etc) + some backups (grid or generator) when there is not enough Sun during the day would cost 30-40k euros. And would still be a fragile system with around 10 years of fully operational life, after some parts of the system might still be operational with enough performances to be kept, but batteries, the most expensive and unrecyclable part of the system will be not. Changing them probably means change battery inverters since voltages and other characteristics might have changed in new batteries, witch is again another important costs of the system. And that's just at private home's level, at scale for industries etc it's simply technologically impossible so far. For those usages we have only fossils, when possible nuclear (need abundant water ready available, significant hydrogeological stability etc, can't be done as easy as place a big diesel or gas generator on ground) or again when possible classic hydro power.

P.v. costs are going down in part because of evolving scale in part artificially because of economical moves (like having skyrocketed prices of oil&gas with various excuses but in reality just for a deliberate speculation) and nuclear costs soar just because instead of being done by a single State are done by various private companies that work between them for profit. We can't really run a country on renewables so far and we will not in the near future.

[1] too many use a classic dumb tricks "hey, with a p.v. system you'll produces more than you consume", witch is true in kWh/month terms, witch is false in time distribution of such production concentrated between morning and early afternoon and zero in the rest of the time

Electricity isn't the only source of carbon, ghg or other pollution. And indeed, it's one of the easier ones since wind and solar are the cheapest sources of electricity these days (partly thanks to Germany's foresight and early investments)

If I was going to ding Germany for anything (because they've been pretty much world leaders on the whole climate thing) it would be their initial reluctance to embrace EVs but they seem to be over that now. And they stepped back slightly on their climate leadership under a right-wing government but greens seem to have more influence currently so getting back on track.

But generally their carbon intensity of the whole economy is trending in the right direction, despite doing more heavy manufacturing than most other EU countries.

>wind and solar are the cheapest sources of electricity these days

*because they are absurdly subsidized, as opposed to other methods of production which have been repeatedly fucked over the years.

Early government support of R&D and market support is one of the things that Germany (and a few other countries) contributed to the current success of renewables.

So that is in part why they are cheap, but they are also simply cheaper now due to their scale of production.

Nothing 'absurd' about that though so not quite sure what you're claiming is happening. Presumably something along the lines of there being a big conspiracy to hide the true costs of renewables which hurts the real cheap energy sources, which are fossil fuels. Which feels backwards to me.

No, they are currently not subsidized at all. What was done was guaranteeing minimum prices for renewable energy. These prices used to be way higher than market prices to make renewable energy generation economically feasible. This way especially important in the first decade of this century and back then you could call the renewables heavily subsidized.

But recently market prices for electricity were by far exceeding the minimum guaranteed prices, so you can't call those renewables as "heavily subsidized".

> Germany was held up as the global model over and over.

They were/are, but IMO, Germany seem to be in a terrible position re managing their energy needs.

They have had huge price increases - partly because they have had such dependence on Russia, and because they have removed their own power plants.

How are they the model when France had green energy since the 90s? CO2 saved earlier is far more helpful.

People who choose the narrative of who the model is are thought leaders like journalists, academics and politicians. They are narrative and process oriented, not outcome oriented. This means that when a process started with good intentions fails horribly (like Germany's decarbonation) they do not change opinions - Germany tried to do the right thing (even if it was a risky bet without precedent) so it's blameless. There is no course correction - the process was correct wasn't it ?

Furthermore, they have entrenched this mode of functioning in Western societies, who have become process not outcome oriented.

People interested in hacking and startups are probably among the most outcome oriented, so have trouble understanding how this process oriented mindset without course correction can exist.

Because France is planning to follow Germany's lead?

Would be weird to hold France up as a model. "Let the Nuclear plants you built a generation ago slowly age out and be replaced by renewables that Germany helped establish" isn't something most countries could emulate, they'll jump straight to the renewables, because they're cheaper and better.

You can thank 30 years of sabotage by ecologists for our nuclear industry stagnating, and 20 years of complete incompetence by our politicians.

> You can thank 30 years of sabotage by ecologists

40+. The protests against superphenix started immediately and the rocket attack on the site was in 1982.

The attacker was Chaïm Nissim, who’d go on to get elected in geneva as a member of the swiss green party.

Because the same culture unfortunately prevails. France is no longer as green as it was because of that.

Germany has much more soft power in the anglophone world, for both wrong and bad reasons. Hence the idealisation of the German Engineer. France is more of a pain in the arse and more difficult to take seriously.

The "response" have issues from being done by neolierals. Nuclear (actual, so fission) is expensive and dangerous enough to be a government-only show, It's not something that can be offloaded to private hands. Because of that neoliberals hate it.

Modern p.v. and eolic means tons of small "products" to be sold and sold regularly because as long as tech improve after 10 years even if a plant is still fully functional it's about time to refresh it. As a result means a very profitable business for private companies (just try to track those behind Greta Thumberg, you'll end up quickly to giants like ABB, Ökoworld AG, Dii GmbH, Enel, EDF, Endesa, Abengoa, Siemens, Cevital and various investments banks). Oil giants are sitting on big money but they know their business sooner or later will end at least because of more and more scarce resources, so they like to diversify their investments. That's is. France have more nuclear because France have more public (have had, at least, with recent government and projects things goes very badly here)...

"New" nuclear projects are stuck for similar reasons: investors want profit, the service is just a mean to elicit profits, not a purpose and the profit a reward.

Swiss is luck to a certain extent because of it's small size and a certain policy toward autonomy, they aren't really autonomous especially recently but at least hydro thanks to the orography can play an important role and probably can still grow a bit toward many smaller-size plants so just pushing nuclear a bit they can be almost autonomous again. France to be autonomous must re-nationalize EDF erasing Hercules project and other disastrous neoliberal moves. Others are almost doomed: Germany have not good enough infra in the whole country, it's private-based development under USA control have had so negative effects that I do not know how they can be back in power, Italy is also doomed, Spain might have a bit more chances but I'm not much sure and other countries are completely out of the game.

Having a small p.v. with lithium storage I've reasoned a bit just in terms of personal energy autonomy in Green New Deal terms: having built s new house (Minergie-alike (BBC) if you are Swiss) I already have all electrical and winter heating demand far less energy than an old house, winter cooling is needed thanks to the climate only during the sunny days where there is plenty of electricity however try to be almost autonomous (witch means near-zero consumption from the grid, but with the grid as a cheap backup, cheaper than running on a generator) would mean are 30-40k euros more in both battery, a geothermic heat-pump since the actual heating (hot water stored in the garage + VMC + low inertia heat transfer to the house) stress batteries too much in many winter nights. Enlarging that to all houses: we can build something similar for individual homes in perhaps 50+ years. We still have to power industries. Even if in a soon future we can use e.v. as part of the house power plant (both to recharge them when not used, thanks to more than one car and WFH, and when they supply energy to the home microgrid) we are still not autonomous in a safe manner, the investment is a significant fraction of the entire home value and the worst part: it does not last longer. Batteries really used can last from 5 to 8 years while formally they'll last 10. That's means around 10-12k euros per year, doable for middle-class that will be impoverished by such hi prices but not doable for most others, a vast majority of the citizens. And still nothing to produce enough of such gears for even just only the middle class. Nothing for the industry, hospitals, shipping, airplanes etc. Long story short the actual new deal is a way to elict money from all to enrich few, making all much more surveilled (IoT is mandatory in such systems, and done in connected and proprietary ways) and poor. Witch is actually the 2030 Davos agenda. It's almost NOTHING for climate change (the sole part is that the need of new home might means homes able to offer better climate comfort, hopefully built in hydrogeologically safe places). Oil&gas will remain probably as long as we have them in sufficient quantities and nuclear will be kept going hoping for fusion, but all in a world ruled by private bodies so a world that can't really innovate.

a nuclear society is neither green nor sustainable.

Complete nonsense.

The amount of uranium and thorium on this planet is almost unimaginable. In fact Thorium gets carried to the surface in volcanic activity. So a nuclear society would not have to worry about sustainability for literally 1000s of years.

And that is before we even consider fusion.

As for it not being green. Nuclear reactors have very controlled inputs and outputs. Nothing is lost and civilian nuclear waste has never hurt anybody and certainty not nature.

By first principle, a nuclear society uses the least amount of resources in terms of mining and land to power human society for 1000s of years.

> Complete nonsense.

please behave.

> The amount of uranium and thorium on this planet is almost unimaginable.

So is gold. Both don't fall from the sky however.

> fusion

Not currently option, but wee need one now.

> Nuclear reactors have very controlled inputs and outputs.

Waste with loooong times to take good care of. Calculate the provision for 10000 years of toilet paper for a single security guard.

> By first principle, a nuclear society uses the least amount of resources in terms of mining and land to power human society for 1000s of years.

So the hunter-gatherers were definitively nuclear.

> So is gold. Both don't fall from the sky however.

Thorium is literally a waste product resulting from rare earth mining. With basically no effort we could have 100s of years of reserves. Thorium is also available in waste quantities in basically every country in the world.

So its not at all like Gold.

> Not currently option, but wee need one now.

No we don't. Fusion actually make very economics sense outside of a few very specific issues. We certainty don't need it in the next 50 years. And practically speaking for power generation on earth fission will likely remain the cheaper option.

> Waste with loooong times to take good care of. Calculate the provision for 10000 years of toilet paper for a single security guard.

In any real nuclear society you would only produce waste that only needs a few 100 years of storage.

And anyway toilet paper and pope are simply resources that are recyclable. So not sure why that would even be an issue.

Also, you literally don't need a guard at all.

> So the hunter-gatherers were definitively nuclear.

Hunter-gathers required waste amount of land to produce their daily energy inputs.

It is pretty green compared to the alternatives. And if we wanted to we could build breeder reactors that stretch our nuclear fuel reserves to a few hundred years at least. It is an open question whether 100% nuclear is cheaper or more expensive than 100% renewables though.

100% nuclear is not economical or practical. Nuclear is poorly suited to regular spikes and short-term load balancing. It shines when you need reliable, cheap electricity 24 hours a day, all year round (or at least for several days).

100% solar and wind also isn’t economical or practical. Their output is more cyclical and less reliable, and they tend to fail together.

The best way to run a power grid is actually to balance nuclear, wind/solar, and hydro (which has its own set of advantages and drawbacks).

So, the “100% this or 100% that” question is a red herring. We must use all the tools available (because the situation is actually quite dire), where they make sense.

> 100% nuclear is not economical or practical. Nuclear is poorly suited to regular spikes and short-term load balancing.

While using only nuclear power plants for all the domestic electricity generation of a country doesn't make much sense, some reactor design, notably French ones (in particular composition of the control rods and their placement in the core, among other things) allows for very flexible control over power output. [0] EDF makes the surprising claim that their plants are as flexible as gas plants, which are generally considered as the go-to method of load following.

Also curious to why 100% nuclear wouldn't be economical, wouldn't this hypothetical situation benefits from the economy of scale and grid management simplification?

[0] https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document (PDF)

But wind turbines and photovoltaic panels are also neither green nor sustainable (especially when you take into account all the mining and the CO2 involved in their manufacturing and transportation, and especially when you take into account the backup system e.g. gaz or batteries to compensate for their intermittent nature).