Ok so 90% fossil free production year round every single day with a typical renewable contribution of ~20% that we observe anywhere with substantial renewable deployments. Who’s the one quibbling over facts? Storage is not needed for nuclear. Not sure where you’re getting that idea from. France is reliably the only developed country where most of the energy is produced without any fossil fuels and renewables are a relatively small part of that story.

Nuclear is nowhere near as reliable as you are claiming. In 2022, more than half the French reactor fleet had to be taken offline at some stage or another - output over the year was 65% of the previous year. In August of that year, nuclear was delivering 40% of what would have been expected and the country ended up being the largest importer of electricity in Europe for the year.

There's been a recovery this year but that recovery has faltered last month with about a 15% unexpected fall in output.

Whenever France is hit by a heatwave, nuclear output drops significantly - the water of the rivers used for cooling/condensing becomes too warm to operate plants at full capacity safely.

And even with effective monopoly advantage, nuclear generation is a money pit - French government had to bail out EDF at the start of this year - taking on 65B euro of debt.

Yes, we've let global warming be so much of a problem that existing nuclear power plant designs are now struggling to get cool enough to operate. But heat engines aren't the only way to convert fissile energy into electricty. We should 100% be researching direct capture so that the ability to generate electricty is not bounded by our ability to cool the reactor. And yet even with all that, most of the electricity generated still remains fossil free.

> nuclear generation is a money pit - French government had to bail out EDF at the start of this year - taking on 65B euro of debt.

Power generation is a money pit period. California has to constantly bail out PG&E here too because of all the lawsuits about fires & I see this happen frequently all over the world. Pretending like large scale power generation isn't a substantial government problem and the free market can solve it by itself AFAICT is a complete pipe dream. Hell in California there's a massive fight now because California is having to alter the rules to support grid solar installations by making roof top solar less attractive & this is a common problem facing all grid operators. And honestly, 65B euro is a pittance to have such a major reduction in fossil fuels for the year. Think about it this way - would you add a $300B line item to the US budget to bail out nuclear if it meant that only 10% of grid energy would be generated by fossil fuels? Like that seems like a laughably small number. France has 56 nuclear reactors and the US has 96 spread across 60 plants despite being 5x the size. In France, fossil fuels have seen 0 growth in terms of TWh produced since the 80s & in fact a small dip. Nowhere else in the world is that true including Germany which invested in renewables early & by a lot.

Storage is required for a mainly nuclear grid to be anywhere near cost effective.

That 10 percent of fossil, plus the controllable hydro in France is working in tandem with the nuclear to match demand.

Remove that gas and hydro and a nuclear grid needs storage just as a mainly solar and wind grid does.

Yes in theory, if price is no object, both can just overbuild so much you avoid needing storage but that would be stupid.

Sure, but we’re still talking about 10% of fossil fuel needs. So we’re comparing ~60-80% fossil fuels vs 10%. That’s a major accomplishment difference. Also I hope you’d agree that the storage needed to replace 10% of fossil fuels is much less than the storage needed to replace 60-80% right?

Also, not sure if you’re aware, but most modern reactors don’t need storage. They can vary load generation dynamically and so don’t actually need storage. France’s reactors are all very old as they’ve been infected with the same disease of failing to take on large public works projects in a timely and cost efficient manner. It’s not as fuel efficient, but that matters very little for a nuclear plant in the grand scheme of things.

> It’s not as fuel efficient, but that matters very little for a nuclear plant in the grand scheme of things.

What matters is that the upfront capital costs of nuclear are so insanely high that any hour you’re not producing 100% you’re losing money you can’t afford to lose.

I’m not convinced that load following nuclear makes economic sense compared to next generation energy storage solution. Say Ambri’s molten metal batteries.

Nuclear had better pray that these energy storage solutions never become economically competitive, because if they do then solar/wind+storage will beat nuclear in almost every application. And if that’s the case, nuclear just won’t have the economies of scale necessary to be competitive at all.

Nuclear energy also has to pray that advanced geothermal doesn’t catch on, as it competes directly with nuclear, but has the benefit of being able to take direct advantage of skilled labour from the oil and gas industry that’s soon becoming increasingly redundant.

> any hour you’re not producing 100% you’re losing money you can’t afford to lose.

Yeah, electricity pricing for consumers is mismatched in terms of how energy demands work. Solar has the opposite problem where it may be unable to supply energy when you need it which is a much bigger problem - instead of losing money your energy grid goes down. Of we turn on peaker power plants because while batteries can weather short outages I don’t believe anyone has demonstrated running a grid off stored energy for any reasonable amount of time.

And again, I’m going to call it an unsubstantiated claim that hybrid nuclear plants that can scale energy output as needed are uneconomical. I know they’re slightly more expensive but I’m not aware of any data suggesting that it is actually intrinsically uneconomical. Same goes for any claims that solar or wind is cheaper than nuclear - all the data I’ve found had solar as way more expensive and wind as slightly more expensive vs nuclear.

And I wouldn’t hold my breath on storage. I think we’re less likely to get a crazy new battery technology that solves all the things we need from it in a cheaper and safer way than nuclear research. There’s lots of crazy battery ideas but those ideas have been around for a long time and we have no indication that can scale. China is building a molten salt reactor right now. And additionally we don’t need government R&D dollars flowing into battery research as much as we need it flowing into figuring out how to make nuclear even safer and more economical. Normal market economics are already a big enough prize to cause private R&D dollars to go after that (batteries are everywhere and the essentially the same battery tech that’s in your smartphone is what’s in an EV which makes the market opportunity massive and obvious - that’s not as obviously clear for private investors for nuclear energy because it need regulatory approval to build a plant which means we don’t know how big that market would actually be). It’s not nuclear vs solar. It’s nuclear vs fossil fuels and renewables vs fossil fuels and so far fossil fuels has kicked renewables’ butt and had it butt kicked by nuclear. If this were a fight, where should the actual smart money be in terms of achieving net zero?

Do they have nuclear cars in France? It looks like nuclear is actually only 31% of France's energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

I mean you get how nonsensical that argument is right? We don’t have solar cars either. Cars do not generate power. We’re talking about generation not consumption. We need electric cars for consumers and that’s orthogonal to how we generate electricity. The reason is that electric cars can take their energy needs equally well from energy generated by a coal plant, a nuclear power plant or solar. That’s why electrification is absolutely needed for climate change. It’s got massive difficulties obviously because it’s a huge load on the power grid (today’s grids wouldn’t be able to handle if everyone started driving electric). And electrification should also be used as a feedback mechanism where charging cars are used as distributed batteries to help solve the storage problem for renewables and that unfortunately isn’t happening on any real level.

I think we probably also need hydrogen fuel cells for fleet cars / trucking because they can eat the logistical and safety costs of storing hydrogen (hydrogen fuel cell consumer cars are a pipe dream IMO because you simply can’t have refilling stations scattered around everywhere - it’s massive explosion risk in population dense areas with untrained people dealing with it).

But if we’re talking about grid energy production, nuclear is the only real path for solving climate change. It sucks but that’s the reality.

I think you missed the point: without storage nuclear only gets to 70% of the grid, and 31% of the total energy demand. With enough storage to displace oil and gas demand, nuclear has no advantage. It's a pity that France never spent the money to migrate the non-grid portion of their economy to electricity, but that was probably a simple matter of the economics of nuclear never really panning out.

You get how automotive energy storage and grid scale energy storage are totally different right? Like a huge portion of oil consumption is automotive and shipping and that has 0 demands on the grid. Yes, we need storage solutions for portable energy and solar fails on that mark too (that’s why EVs are battery backed and don’t bother putting on solar panels to regenerate those batteries). So when we electrify automotive, energy requirement needs for cars are going to skyrocket. Solar can thankfully probably accommodate a huge part of that because we can time shift charging to happen during the day but that also means that a good chunk of solar energy construction is being dedicated to charging storage capacity we built and put into cars and not offsetting our already substantial and ever growing non-automotive grid energy needs.

I don’t know why you claim nuclear has no advantage if we’re talking about a country whose grid manages to achieve that only 10% of grid production is coming from fossil fuels. That’s a lot smaller storage problem to solve than the 60-80% that renewables has to solve (not to mention it needs to actually build that capacity which is going to take a long time because all the evidence is that that % mix by renewables grows very slowly over long periods of time).

You opened this thread with "I agree with the left that climate change is a major problem". Yet you are blind that in your canonical example of the effectiveness of nuclear, France, their energy is still mostly powered with fossil fuels. If France is the best example of success of nuclear I say it shows that nuclear is a failure as far as climate change is concerned. The French really tried in the 80s, but the outcome is a fairly nice train network with a 20% modal share, and more oil consumption today than when they started.

Now let's look to the future: solar is vastly cheaper and easier to install per TWh generated. It can be installed quickly and incrementally. Solar modules come in at around 1% of the cost per W of nuclear right now, and still decreasing, that's an enormous margin to work with: If you have a way to seasonally offset energy through efuels for ships and planes as you propose, and a fleet of EVs with 100kWh of storage, the effort to just solve the remaining grid fluctuations seems straightforward. Roughly speaking, without storage nuclear has no useful solution for transport, transport is the hardest part of emissions to mitigate, but any solution that uses nuclear derived electricity for transport will be far cheaper with renewables.

We have South Australia, which produced more low carbon energy this year from solar and wind than France did from nuclear, and without any significant storage as a counter example for your low carbon grid. It appears that the French model is harder to reproduce than the South Australian model, and the evidence is that it could be copied organically everywhere: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41971-7

You either seem to have a problem distinguishing grid-scale energy production from energy consumption or you're intentionally muddying the waters.

It kind of feels intentional because it'd be like me arguing that grid solar is pointless because ships still burn diesel. Like you get that at this point we need to get to negative emissions to start removing carbon from the atmosphere and carbon recapture is a really energy intensive process (you basically have to spend more to recapture than you spent burning in the first place & we've still today burn fucktons of fossil fuels).

Non-grid consumption is driven by many more use-cases. Even if you had 100% nuclear or 100% solar or 100% wind in the grid, you'd still see more oil consumption today than in the past simply because of transportation which even today is predominantly fossil fuel based. EV electrification will help bring that down & that's happening but you still have non-electric trains, planes, and shipping and we don't really know how to solve that for the latter 2 which are massive contributors (much more than cars).

In fact, if you look at your own graph, the share that is consumed by nuclear has a direct inverse correlation with fossil fuels. The same is not true for other fuel sources. If we get more solar, the percentage that fossil fuels takes up seems to be largely unmoved. If we get more nuclear, there's a direct reduction in fossil fuels. If we use less nuclear you see an uptick. The reason the numbers don't look as impressive for consumption is that there's a huge amount of fossil fuels being consumed that have nothing to do with the grid. But replacing fossil fuels in the grid is hugely important because otherwise your EV car would be an expensive toy and would be a marginal benefit to the environment (grid fossil fuel power plants are marginally better at generating electricity than your smaller car engine but it's like a small % improvement vs nuclear/solar/hydro/wind which all have 0 emissions generated per KWh).

It's fascinating that South Australia is the model you've chosen as "this can be replicated" when your talking about one of the most arid, deserted, and sparsely populated places in the world that has continuous sine shine year round. Like you get that's not actually a representative scenario right & renewables are hugely dependent on geographically specific conditions? Grid-scale renewables face substantial technical hurdles in addition to policy ones. Nuclear doesn't really have technical hurdles and faces much larger political and regulatory ones but given that the US has had a movement to impede civillian nuclear reactors globally, 32 countries are still operating 443 plants globally. We can always choose different policies and choose to build 5000 reactors even if we overbuild capacity and it costs us a lot of money. If we remain with the current status quo, solar will win in the long run, but that long run concerns me. Like I have doubts we'll get to 50% freedom from fossil fuels for production (not consumption - just production) by 2050 focusing on renewables like we have been. This is a problem because as mentioned all the investments we make in EVs are pointless if the grid itself isn't carbon free. It may make you feel good but it isn't solving the problem. And on the consumption side, we need to figure out how to switch all the largest ships to nuclear reactors cause I don't know what else solves that problem & that's a huge contributor. Plastics are another huge fossil fuel consumer and I don't know what to do there either. But none of that is relevant in the discussion of solar vs nuclear as a replacement strategy for existing fossil fuel dependence within the power grid.

Fossil fuels are only 8.6%. I would call that "nearly 100% fossil fuel free."

91.4%