To be more precise: 5 countries represent 96% of EU uranium imports: Niger (24,26%), Kazakhstan (22,99%), Russia, Australia and Canada.
A country like France has 1-2 years of uranium stock for its electricity production.
Dependence on Russia is way less critical for uranium than gas.
[1] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/luranium-importe-en-euro...
Nuclear is so amazing, right? Relatively small, high tech self-contained facilities that rhyme with some of the best science fictions out there.
However, the moment you dive in it you see just how long it gets to build these things, how expensive they get with with each safety failure and you get to see the unsexy parts of it like mining and processing the raw materials and then the nuclear waste that just sits there waiting to be transferred to its final destination.
Working with Russia didn't have to be a bad thing. What makes EU great(you can argue over the other functions of EU) is the peace it creates through co-dependence and shared interest and Russia was very well suited to benefit from it. Russia provides the resources, EU pays for those resources and Russia buys stuff from EU with that money and as a result Europeans get the energy and Russians get the European goods. It's a win-win relationship that fell apart when the head of Russia did not needed to provide with a well being any longer to stay as a head.
I personally wish Russia had stayed a partner. It makes sense to be co-depended with partners but as Europe got the short end of the stick as the relationship fell apart it only makes sense offset any dependence to Russia even at a cost.
nuclear advocates advocate for nuclear when it makes sense.
so any advocate for any kind of energy policy preference is fed up, frustrated, and so on.
green advocates? yeah, completely right with regards to global warming, ecological disasters, fucking up the planet, etc.
based on one's morality we can say that advocates of global fairness are right in their view that currently the "West" has the burden to exert a heroic effort to fix the warming they caused, and help the poor countries to skip the "fossil phase". and anyone pointing out that this effort is basically non-existent is also right. (and so poor countries will be likely more affected by climate change and economic and energy shocks than rich ones. mostly because being rich helps with almost everything, and also because poor countries tend to be located in areas that used to enjoy year-round warm climate with occasional extremely warm days which will now become a lot more frequent)
on top of all this poor countries usually doesn't have the luxury of picking the best long-term solution. (but as we saw even rich countries have been optimizing for short-term nowadays.)
. .
okay, that said, economics of nuclear energy, it all depends on economies of scale. it's basically irrelevant what happens with 1-10 power plants.
if in a given country there won't be a healthy nuclear energy industry, then keeping one plant alive is .. irrelevant. (even if economically retrofitting a 40-50 year old plant is cheap, because the big ticket items are already paid for ~40 years ago.)
renewables got cheaper because they are mass produced. were nuclear plants mass produced they would be drastically cheaper too. (that's the promise of small modular reactors.) but even simply ordering 100+ big plants would push down costs from the ~3rd one. (if they were properly standardized and near identical. it parts were pre-fabricated, and so on.)
basically construction (so housing and transportation ... and healthcare and education) everywhere is getting more and more costly because technological progress is unevenly making other things more cheap. (and also our standards are going up, so we use the old inefficient technology and more skilled labor to build better things, it'll be simply more expensive.)
Nuclear power plants are the most expensive way of generating energy and the least sustainable way.
We don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. We were checking for a "Endlager" which means a place to hoard all the nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Guess what? No one wanted it.
Bavaria tried to keep themselves out of possible regions for waste disposal, while going full PR pro-nuclear.
So nuclear power plants are basically neither a long term solution, nor a short term solution.
No it doesn't. Not anymore than gas, coal and renewables at least.
The issue of disposal is also simply incorrect. There are plenty of places to store it, France does it, everyone does it. Do you know where the waste from coal goes? Into the atmosphere, where it kills thousands directly and potentially billions indirectly with global warming. So it's comical to criticise nuclear for waste issues.
Barring hydro (which Germany cannot have) and coal/gas, there is no alternative but nuclear. Renewables cannot be a reliable source of energy because they are intermittent. You will always need some stable source, and currently (and for the foreseeable future), it's nuclear.
The question is not, whether there are places or not. It doesn't matter if none of the 16 regions in Germany wants to be responsible to store the waste.
If no one wants to deal with it, the effect is the same.
We don't even have a good way
to dispose nuclear waste.
Nuclear energy is [...] massively
[subsidized] by the state.
Sounds interesting, would you mind to expand / link some site that goes into details?
> It's not nuclear that's massively subsidized, everything else is.
Germany massively cut funding for solar power being supplied into to the grid (Einspeisevergütung) back in 2012 [1] and it still isn't funded the way it was before.
But it is and was still worth it for most people, if they just consumed most of the electricity themselves. [2]
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2012/37990550_... [2] https://www.kfw.de/inlandsfoerderung/Privatpersonen/Bestands...
I think that the comment was ironic, to show a parallel with how coal waste is "utilized"
I seriously do wish someone would write a book called "The case for a Chernobyl plant in your neighborhood!".
Such a case wouldn't concede the point about the safety paranoia surrounding nuclear power, but instead suggest that we literally power the entire word with pre-Chernobyl RBMK reactor designs. Or hell! Something even more dangerous if we can find it.
We can then assume that we'd have N meltdowns per year somewhere in the world, i.e. a "Chernobyl-level incident", and we'd still be far ahead in terms of safety compared to where we are today.
And that's not just comparing nuclear to coal, just the deaths and injuries from rooftop solar installations are in the ballpark of a Chernobyl incident every year.
Discussions about nuclear are paralyzed by safety concessions[1] beyond all reason. That's the problem with nuclear, not that it's comparatively unsafe or expensive when the costs and risks are fairly evaluated against the alternatives.
1. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-p...
I think there are basically two problems with nuclear safety:
- one is that a single incident is broadcasted everywhere, no matter if there are causalities or not. This is similar to planes: when one crashes and 200 people die it makes the news. We have in France about 10 people dying every day in car accidents.
- the second one is the nature of the accident. When you fall from a rooftop, well bad luck. The place you fell on is not unuseable for millenia. This may be (and only "may") be the case with nuclear incidents. Now, the newer plants do not explose like Chernobyl did, because physics is going to drive down the reaction. There can be leaks, even dangerous leaks, but they will be quite localized.
xkcd had a wonderful graph on radiation: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
> one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia
It is a common false perception that it is a problem, very often pushed by fake news outlets. You might be a victim. Russia produces about 15% of the world's uranium [1], according to UNECE.
[1] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...
Lastly, nuclear power plants produce a constant base load while the coal and gas power plants have a very dynamic output and it's simply misleading to pretend that a GW of nuclear energy can replace a GW of coal or gas without taking all of the production into account.
Imagine the importance of Russian uranium if there was a nuclear renaissance and the world suddenly built terawatts of nuclear plants, which is what this article is proposing and presumably you too. And also, Russians are one of the last countries that actually builds them including abroad, so a nuclear surge would mean countries lining up to have Russian nuclear plants built.
The article is devoid of not only data, but common sense.
That's because without the opposition to nuclear, the motivating reason to build up renewables would have been gone, so it wouldn't have happen. Which means Germany would have continued with about 10 % (of primary energy) nuclear and the rest would have been fossil fuels.
And now almost 50 years later we have way waaay more knowledge, experience and technology to build safe powerplants within a short time.
The hindrance is bureaucracy. Ask anyone who is or have been working for the government how incredibly inefficient it is.
The problem with government inefficiency and nuclear is that the governments are the only ones that dare spend money on it. An example of a private investment was the plant in South Carolina that was halted after 9 billion spent. The reason was that they realized they would not make it in time to cash in on a subsidy, and without that the project would never ever be profitable. And normally you could say it happens, it's the company's money, but the debt is being paid by the utility's customers. They're paying for electricity from a power plant that does not exist.
I don't understand the people that think this is a rational solution.
That's completely BS. More French reactors are off than usual because of delayed scheduled maintenance caused by Covid.
But the industry has tumbled into an unprecedented power crisis as EDF confronts troubles ranging from the mysterious emergence of stress corrosion inside nuclear plants to a hotter climate that is making it harder to cool the aging reactors.
The outages at EDF, Europe’s biggest electricity exporter, have sent France’s nuclear power output tumbling to its lowest level in nearly 30 years, pushing French electric bills to record highs just as the war in Ukraine is stoking broader inflation.
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The article also mentioned EDF might need to be nationalized since it's in so much debt, and in fact this was announced a few days ago.
Just few days ago there was a documetary in ARD, a neutral one, about building back plants to green lawn, the cost and the almost century long effort to build them back that is ridiculous (multiple billions) , that is usually never priced in.
Speaking of cost I found it surprising again how much just building even the new ones is.. I mean they had to compare to a dam to find something worse, wtf? ( https://www.westerninvestor.com/british-columbia/saskatchewa... )
And then also that even if we accept all those downsides, the unsolved waste problem, (yeah a lot of people will give me armchair proposals or the new non-existing reactors that would just eat everything and leave nothing behind... not), that it is not cost competitive, the risk (yes, you tell me Russians are stupid, Fukushima was an exception, 3mile and other incidents were perfectly avoided, but please consider also war and terror), there just wouldn't be enough fuel for the whole word to go all-in (yeahyeh we just scrub it from the sea.. in theory, as much as we could just get all the drinking water from the sea or scrub all the CO2 from the atmosphere with current tech..).
But even if you ignore that again and believe it will be fine, even then if the world would now decide to go all in, the time it takes to build means it wouldn't even make a dent in 15 years - WHICH IS TOO LATE.
We could have avoided a lot if the world went all in renewables the 20-30 years back where we already knew what was coming.. and this is the most surprising thing to me. We could do so much suddenly in regard to Pandemic and now the war.. but in relation to the climate catastrophe they are minor annoyances, still we don't start acting but deter us constantly from the right thing by dreaming of the assumed easy nuclear solution out. Humans!!!
I derailed, sorry. But it will be bad, and nuclear just wont help even a bit.
https://interestingengineering.com/switzerlands-water-batter...
Russia or Korea build a nuclear power unit in approximately 8 years, China - 6.
One of the worst articles I have ever read in my life.