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  • I am sorry but this is bs. Saying renewables are the only thing we need to do is downright dangerous for our future. We need nuclear more than ever. Several reasons here :

    1. If we do 100% renewables, we need to have a backup source of energy when wind/solar can't produce enough (at night/when no wind). Excluding large scale batteries that would be a total ecological disaster and apart from hydroelectricity (that couldn't be expanded further in most of Europe) the only decarbonised energy source capable of serving this role is nuclear. Else it's coal/gas.
    2. It is not cheaper. According to RTE (the french "company" that maintains and builds France's electricity infrastructure), a 100% renewables scenario by 2050 costs 20 billions euros more PER YEAR than 50% nuclear 50% renewables. I'd rather spend them on decarbonising other parts of the economy. I can't say for the rest of the world (I'm French), but in EU this shouldn't be too far off. The only case where nuclear costs the same as renewables would be if new reactors are as expensive to make as the first french EPR (european presurrized reactor, the latest generation) in Flamanville, which is highly unlikely. We can see it right now. Germany spent 1.5x more money building their solar/wind plants than France spent on its reactors. Yet Germany emits 10x more CO2 with its electricity. (+ I think (would need to cross check this) a that a lot of this money was used to buy chinese panels and was way less beneficial to their economy than France's nuclear industry). And like most of the EU they are now dependant on Russia's gas for their electricity.
    3. And more importantly we'd be bottlenecked by our possible production of renewables, even if we reach our very ambitious targets. If we need more capacity than anticipated we wouldn't be able to respond to the demand (that is not an unlikely scenario, as large parts of the economy need to be electrified). But nuclear doesn't rely on the exact same industry. To summarize, we can build x nuclear and y renewables, but we can't build x+y only nuclear nor only renewables.

    And there are many other important points that I don't have time to highlight. The good part of the article is saying relying only on nuclear would be a mistake. Of course we need to make renewables (as said in 3). I really feel like the nuclear debate is totally pointless and driven more by ideology than facts. I sincerely don't see downsides to nuclear that are not worse for any other form of energy.

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