Nukes and geothermal simply cost more than solar and wind: nukes, many, many times more. Spending a billion dollars gets you N GW of solar or wind, and N/M, M>>1, of others. Generally, if you need a steam turbine to keep working, you will trail behind anything with zero opex.
Hydrogen has a plausible place in long-term underground storage, in steel refining and other manufacturing processes, and (as LH2) in the future direction of aviation. It might have other roles, such as an intermediate form when using ammonia. Trying to force it where it is a bad fit adds noise.
It's the time cost. Nuclear takes far too long; geothermal merely takes too long. Same with fancy long-distance HV transmission proposals.
Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.
And yet nuclear is the only tech that has proven to decarbonize a major industrial economy within just a few decades. But of course it takes to long.
When in reality it has not been proven that anybody has ever used solar and wind to de-carbonize a major economy. But somehow everybody knows that it is 'fast'.
Germany could have literally gone to 100% nuclear within the last 20 years and it would likely have cost them 250 billion $ or less. Reliable energy for 100 years. Almost no cost for the grid because you can just build nuclear plants next to coal plants.
> Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.
What is this obsession with short term thinking? When you build major long term infrastructure like trains tunnels, you simply don't do it in a year.
If France could do something in the 70/80s, finishing nuclear reactors multiple reactors every year. Germany could have done the same and they would be done by now.
Ironically because the French were so blessed with so many reactors, they were one of the few nations that didn't use their reactors very well. The Germans were actually better at using their reactors.
The French since the 90s are just as anti-nuclear as everybody else and they have done everything to destroy the amazing fleet they have, and only now realize how incredibly fucking stupid that was. They even forced the utility to collect money from the nuclear fleet and invest in solar. And they forced the utility to sell of nuclear base load at bargain bin prices and then force them to buy that power back at high prices.
And its amazing how anti-nuclear people can look down on France when literally every day they produce green cheap energy for all their people. And they have been saving CO2 for 40+ years, and that is worth more then any CO2 we are saving now.
Almost every other country should envy the French position.
Nuclear is providing cheap long term stable power supply and if they stop forcing their nuclear fleet to support solar and fossil (literally things the French government forced them to do) and do proper maintenance French will have cheap carbon free energy for the next 50+ years.
Funny how nuclear is so expensive and yet somehow people in France and places that nuclear reactors have mostly cheap power while Germany is spending absurd money prevent their population from feeling an even worse hurt from the policy they have inflicted on them.
In total the Germany population over the 50 years has paid way more for energy and getting way worse outcomes. That's a simple fact.
Just the cost for the measure Germany has to take now to buffer from this whole Russia fuckup would have been enough to pay for a whole fleet of nuclear reactors for Germany. Instead they are gone spend another 15+ years using coal and gas and then have to manage an incredibly unstable complex grid while having to replace all those wind plants they put up in the next 20-30 years.
And the French reactors will still be running and still provide stable carbon free power for a low price.
"It can be cheap! All you need is free loans, a liability cap less than the cost of one reactor, money from the military, exemption from any democratic process as to where they go, underfunding decomissioning, cheaping out on materials, never doing maintenance, charging more than the claimed cost, operating at a massive loss, creating a debt you foist on the public, build up billions of unpaid maintenance costs, and then not selling it for cheap! Oh, and you still need to overprovision and build backup."
Also it didn't decarbonize france's economy. It partially decarbonized its electricity, this is well under half of the goal. Numerous countries have achieved more with wind and hydro, and the list of countries with higher VRE percent than france's nuclear is growing longer by the month.
Literally no country uses renwales to produce transport fuel.
France decarbonized electricity and has a very high rate of electricity heating in homes. So they are ahead there to and they did that on the back of the nuclear fleet.
> Numerous countries have achieved more with wind and hydro
And even more country have achieved more with hydro and nuclear, such as Sweden or Switzerland.
So didn't decarbonize its economy then. And sweden prodices about as much wind as nuclear.
They only cost more because of "environmentalists" fighting both new reactors, fuel element transport and waste storage tooth and nail in a way they don't fight coal ash ponds or heavy metal tailing lakes...
(The average lifecycle cost of nuclear power at scale in France - where plants were built before anti-nuclear hysteria - is about 7 cents per kWh, same-ish as the cost of solar or wind fleet, and with fewer intermittency problems. Solar might be cheaper in Hawaii and California, but most places are not blessed with 3,000 hours of sunshine a year.)
Please do not try to resurrect old falsehoods.
We can’t plan our grids or judge the costs according to not just best, but even average scenarios. We have to plan once-in-decades anomalies, the long tail. Non-dispatchable energy sources get exponentially more expensive once you start doing that.
In the future we will need to build out storage. Before there is enough renewable generation to charge storage, building it would be foolish. After, we will need storage, and build it.
If the storage will need to be built out, then your argument about costs is disingenuous in the world without fossils, because those costs are currently masked by fossil generation.
Need for fossil generation backing will decline naturally as storage is built out, but will take a long time to go to zero. Pretending otherwise makes bad policy. Building storage without renewable capacity to charge it from would be stupid because charging storage by fossil fuel burning would be monumentally stupid.
You don't need as much storage if you have nuclear and you can't compare the two without accounting for (potentially weeks or months of) storage. "Building out storage" is not an unavoidable expense that just happens automatically, it's a requirement to have a reliable greed that is mostly based on non-dispatchable renewables, and thus a part of their cost.
Seeing how you outright ignore this point, I suspect you are arguing in bad faith.
Good day, sir.
It's also factually false.
* UK approving Sizewell C for £20bn https://www.ft.com/content/11ca7193-f7d8-496f-bb90-d3270b2cf...
* about 60 reactors are being constructed as we speak https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
* the US just allocated $2.5b to support the demonstration of two advanced U.S. reactors by 2028 (X-energy and TerraPower) https://www.powermag.com/updates-on-five-big-nuclear-energy-...
* just a few days ago NuScale's SMR got approved https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-sm...
Specially now where you have Germany who spend lots on renewables using many 100s of billions to buffer the impacts of their policies. For that price they could have just transformed to nuclear.
Germany could literally have spent the same amount of money over the last 20 and next 5 years and have done what France did in the 70/80s and they would be almost 100% green by now. But nuclear is expensive of course.
And of course those reactors would work for the next 80-100 years, but I guess its much better to rebuild wind turbines 4 times over during that time.
> in steel refining
Far better to use the technology the Boston Metal uses.
> in the future direction of aviation
Questionable. Either use batteries or just go with full synfuels.
Germany would today be in a much worse position if they had spent what they did renewables on upgrading their ramshackle old nuke contraptions. France, notably, imported power through summer.
No there isn't actually. The French pay high taxes because of their social services.
If you actually inform yourself you would know that the cost of the nuclear fleet went on the books of the utility, not the French state and has been paid down by the utility for 40+ years now DESPITE the very low energy prices.
> Germany would today be in a much worse position if they had spent what they did on renewables on upgrading their ramshackle old nuke contraptions instead.
Germany was actually one of the best operates of nuclear power. Their reactor had amazing uptime.
> France, notably, imported power through summer.
And the reason is that the Anti-nuclear idiots who were in power in the French state for the last 30 years took cheap green energy for granted and instead of doing the needed maintenance, they forced the utility to invest in solar and support fossil fuel (yes really).
And in fact in 2015 the French state literally basically forced threw a law to turn off large parts of the nuclear fleet in 2025. This lead to even more maintenance not being done.
This is a case of the French state shooting itself in the foot and taking for granted what their fathers gave to them and them treating the fleet like shit and just believing the magical pixies of renewables would reliably produce 10s of GW of power for them within a few years.
Germany is literally spending up to a 500 billion $ on a plan to mitigate all the issues with their energy policy, for that they could literally have built a nuclear fleet 2x the size they needed to be 100% green on nuclear.
There is not a single reactor on this list with an operation factor (proportion of hours delivering any energy) over 85%.
Storage, backup, and overprovision are part of any system. 24/7/365 nuclear is a myth.
Once you acknowledge that reality it becomes a calculation of total costs vs. total emissions abated. VRE is about 5x as effective by this metric without even using any strategy other than minor overprovision, existing w2e/hydro, and fossil fuel methane backup, because generating even the mythical 100% green energy starting in 20 years is far worse than generating >80% green energy starting in 2 years.
Even if the long term plan is all nuclear (this doesn't work with commercial technology, there's not enough U235) it's still optimal to max out the VRE pipeline first. The VRE will pay back before your nuclear reactor is done just by the money saved on coal and gas.
This has always been a pain point for me. If you feel the world is facing an existential crisis (and I do), then it seems weird to go down the list of possible ways of avoiding utter catastrophe like you're at a sushi bar:
Solar: Ah, yeah.
Wind: Of course.
Nuclear power: Nope.
Geo Engineering: Hell, no.
I don't know how you can believe that we are facing millions, if not billions, of deaths and the possible collapse of civilization and then "tone police" the solutions.