The (botched) green energy transformation has given the country I live in top 3 highest electricity prices in the world and it's not even particularly green at all. Literally cannot get worse. And it seems to me that one half doesn't understand how incredibly bad high energy prices are both for people and industry, while the other half cheers at the prices because it causes deindustrialization and pushes towards degrowth - mainstream talking points of the current generation of climate activists here.
Also, would you please not copy-and-paste the same response multiple times as you've done in the thread? It comes across less as thoughtful discussion and more as spam. (I'm not trying to be rude, but that's how it came across to me.)
Since a few days ago, Germany's policy to reduce or keep energy prices and meet demand depends inextricably to France's building more nuclear reactors. (I am talking about the last industrial nuclear reactors going offline, and the future energy budget planning related to that.)
That's not quite correct. France deferred maintenance during COVID and scheduled the downtime in advance. The inspections then found potential problems, so other reactors did additional maintenance and checks.
They could have been deferred further if needed, but politicians were not willing to make the call.
> Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes people sound as car salesmans.
Nuclear energy is the one that is actually proven to work and be reliable enough to completely displace fossil generation. Nothing else is coming close to that, including solar and wind.
> As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them.
Russia is busy exporting nuclear power plants. A nuclear reactor can be built within 6 years, two reactors within ~9 years (they're built in parallel).
However it is very suitable for base load generation, there's a reason why oil and coal companies lost their marbles in the 50s and astroturfed anti-nuclear into existence.
I'm not sure if that's their most-effective campaign ever or if it's a tie with BP's popularization of the carbon footprint, which atomizes responsibility for climate change and has successfully delayed systematic action for decades. And even managed to get greens and climate change activists to do their work for them. Just like with nuclear. It's actually, genuinely incredible.
That's not quite the case. You can load-follow with nuclear, but it requires reactors to be designed for that. France does this, for example.
You also can simply keep reactors working at a constant level and just dump excess power into their cooling system. This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear energy.
Most nuclear power plants do not do this because they don't need to do it.
Therein lies the problem. Capital costs dominate nuclear plant costs and they are high.
If you load followed such that you kept the reactor at an average of, say, 50% nameplate capacity that would lead to a levelized cost per MWh of about $220.
For reference, Bhadla solar park sells a MWh for roughly $3.
For the US it's $33 per MWh, so doubling it still gives reasonable cost.
As for wind, it simply can not compete right now for guaranteed capacity. The adequacy rating for most wind power plants is around 10%, so you need 10x overbuild to even compete.
This is exactly a point in favor of nuclear.
One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety.
If I had to make long term bets, radioactive materials will continue to be radioactive, green capture, storage and transmission will get cheaper and more reliable.
Speaking of transmission, that's another huge problem. You can't go plopping powerplants just anywhere, and power generation needs to be somewhat close to those consuming it.
Distributed collection and storage helps reduce challenges around transmission infrastructure in low density or hard to travel areas.
Consider Puerto Rico, their investments in solar have skyrocketed, especially with the need to rebuild so much infrastructure. They had nuclear, and they were cleaning up contamination for decades after shutting it down. Also part of the issue with power there is transmission. You don't get the efficiency out of tiny boilers to make them cost effective for these folks.
I think you're pushing a bit hard for a tech that has a lot of problems and while it could play a role in our future, it's unlikely to be a dominant force.
At the factories that produce silicon and composites for the windblades.
> One of these solutions is encumbered by problems of safety, the other capacity. It's easier to scale up capacity than it is to scale safety.
So far, no large country has managed to move to 100% carbon-free renewable generation. And I'm not seeing this changing.
> Distributed collection and storage helps reduce challenges around transmission infrastructure in low density or hard to travel areas.
If we're talking about Europe, they are facing the problem of Dunkelflaute - long periods of no wind, no sun, and low temperatures in the middle of the winter. A worst-case once-in-century scenario would require around a _month_ of storage.
So far no technology is even close to that.
And if we compared these factories and their environmental impacts we would see a net increase from the production of solar and wind products? That's the point, and you ducked it hard.
> So far, no large country has managed to move to 100% carbon-free renewable generation. And I'm not seeing this changing.
Who said that we had to hit 100%? There is a place for burning stuff for fuels in our society for long to come, the point is not having it the default way we power larger systems.
> If we're talking about Europe, they are facing the problem of Dunkelflaute - long periods of no wind, no sun, and low temperatures in the middle of the winter. A worst-case once-in-century scenario would require around a _month_ of storage.
> So far no technology is even close to that.
Okay, that's a great argument to not continue investing in storage solutions, but let's be real, a new nuclear steam turbine isn't coming online _tomorrow_ either.
Let's do both, and not pretend like the more risky one is less dangerous than it is, when things go wrong.
Europe has many petawatt hours of potential hydrogen storage capacity in its salt formations.
Extending their lives to 100 will not only raise maintenance costs even further it will raise the risk of catastrophe quite significantly.
This would be a catastrophe for which e.g. American plants are insured only up to the level of 0.05% of 1 Fukushima level event.
In particular, annealing had been developed fairly recently: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featurerenewal-by-annea...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fu...
Here is the official data for Germany for every year in the past several decades https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...
The bottom three are:
black coal in magenta
nuclear in gray
brown coal in brown
Nuclear shutdowns started in Germany in 2011. It should be easy to see that coal went down significantly since then and is at a historic low. Which brings me back to my original point:
Renewables have been pushed for 20 years and have started to accelerate only 10 years ago, yet they are already displacing fossil fuels in many countries.
I might be lazy, but you are outright dishonest.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
Germany went up last two years, but have otherwise been on a steady decline along with the rest of the continent. In 2011 Germany was at 473 g CO2 per kWh of electricity. In 2022 this was down to 386 g CO2/kWh but went down to 333 g CO2 / kWh in 2020.
I will leave it to you to figure out if there was any world event going on in 2020 which would have made it particularly low (i.e. allowed renewables to take up a greater portion of the electricity production), as well as in 2022 which could make it particularly high.
CO2 per kWh is also going down as renewables went up. Also easy to check in the data. You haven't done that either.
From your news source:
> "Only in Germany, with 10 gigawatts (GW), is the reversal at a significant scale. This has increased coal power generation in the European Union, which is expected to remain at these higher levels for some time," the IEA's annual coal market report said.
So your news source only mentions Germany, and only during an energy crisis caused be a war. If you only look at this one country, and only from February 2022 to April 2023 you may find coal consumption going up, but if you look over any other period, or include any other European country, you will see the opposite effect.
Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes people sound as car salesmans. As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them. As soon as you say "ok, build them reactors if they are so perfect", nuclear advocates want the state to jump in and asume the costs, the consumers to pay an extra price, the safety regulations back to 1960 and the future people to deal with the residues.