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Well yea, countries keep buying nuclear from France because it's clean, cheap, and they don't want to suffer the political backlash from the science lacking environmentalists which come forward when they talk about building nuclear on their own land
German green party
Nuclear plants:🤮
Carbon plants (that actually produce more radiation that nuclear plants): 🥰
They have spurred on the solar/wind movement successfully though, albeit whilst using coal as a crutch. Even so, without the greens, alternative energy might never have been a discussion in a country like Germany which is positively obsessed with gas and cars
The problem is replacing nuclear with renewables does nothing to combat climate change. We need to be reducing fossil fuels. At the very least, they should have phased out coal before nuclear. While france was busy reducing its dependence on coal, Germany remains the largest producer of coal in Europe.
You’re certainly right that their handling of nuclear was inefficient for reducing carbon output.
I’m pretty pro nuclear, but I don’t think that really takes away from their success in pushing renewables forward, they were a very early adopter of solar thanks to their very generous subsidies and probably helped fuel its growth at a faster rate, so regardless of their unfortunate paranoia around nuclear, they do deserve some praise. Perfect is the enemy of good, and given the speed the world has responded to climate change, Germanys mixed and painful transition was certainly not the worst.
See also: the "Atomkraft? Nein Danke" sticker that has a cartoon picture of the biggest nuclear reactor in the solar system on it. Irony: it's good for the blood dearie.
Fusion is way better than fission
For starters more Helium really improves the World by facilitating the making of Daffy Duck impressions.
Agreed. There is a problem we have about where to put the fission waste but the actual generation process is cleaner than carbon.
The nuclear ship had sailed long before the Green Party became part of the current government. While I also think that nuclear power is a much better alternative to coal power plants it’s simply not feasible to revert Germany’s decision when wind and solar is as cheap as it is now.
The problem with solar is going to be scaling it to meet power demands. Never mind the fact that solar companies are cutting down trees to make way for solar fields.
Nuclear energy and hopefully nuclear fusion will be the future
It’s too late to start new nuclear projects. The quickest Gen 3 reactor build in the US was 14 years. So starting now, you’re looking to finish near 2040. And for those 14 years of construction, you’re pumping huge amounts of CO2. Over its lifetime it will emit less CO2 than many other forms of power, but that’s too slow. We need to be reducing emissions now, not reducing emissions in the 2050s and beyond.
What? Is there a good alternative? If we could magically make the world 100% renewable+nuclear in only 14 years that would be amazing I think. It would not solve everything, but sometimes it takes a bit to stop the bleeding before healing can start (carbon capture and planting trees during nuclear construction maybe?)
Is there a faster way?
Yes. Regulatory overreach has made it 14 years to build nuclear plants. Almost all of which is interminable red tape. We should fix that, not pretend it's a feature of the technology.
I like the the Greens, but they actually initiated the phase out the last time they ruled 20 years ago. One of their core ideologies was the opposition of nuclear power.
But they were also for a coal phaseout. They aren’t responsible for how atomic plants got replaced and that the phaseout got changed into specific dates, they implemented a more flexible phaseout.
A later government decided to slowly replace coal plants with gas plants and keep those coal plants in standby for emergencies for some time. Which is what triggered last year, as those standby plants fired up again when gas plants became unreliable.
I'm not familiar with the German politics, but are you saying that Germany got rid of nuclear despite environmentalists?
These decisions are mainly rooted in the peace movement of the 80s (fueled by the nuclear missiles in Germany installed by the US) and the direct experience of Tschernobyl. Its supported by the majority in the public.
The current political decision was made by the more conservative government.
France has been importing more electricity than exporting in 2022 because their nuclear reactors can’t perform in the heat resulting from climate change. And this is more likely to happen again as each year becomes hotter.
I’m not sure where this fetishism for France‘s nuclear energy is coming from.
The fetishism for nuclear was just imported 1:1 from Reddit
Hell no. It's economically only justifiable for france, because they need an excuse to finance their nuclear research. Ecologically it would be, if the Uranium just popped out of the ground before the power plant and not producing waste.
Still a sweet deal: we get the energy, france keeps the risk, russia mines get the pollution.
cheap
It's literally the most expensive power of any of the major options.
"In December 2020 IEA and OECD NEA published a joint Projected Costs of Generating Electricity study which looks at a very broad range of electricity generating technologies based on 243 power plants in 24 countries. The primary finding was that "low-carbon generation is overall becoming increasingly cost competitive" and "new nuclear power will remain the dispatchable low-carbon technology with the lowest expected costs in 2025". The report calculated LCOE with assumed 7% discount rate and adjusted for systemic costs of generation.[79] "
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
The IEA is a bad joke that has been notoriously wrong in its projections for decades. Nobody in the industry takes them seriously.
How so? I am in the industry and everyone I work with take them seriously.
Edit:
Even if you refute predictions made by the IAE, nuclear is still not as expensive as other sources of electricity. For a more specific example, the University of Waterloo released this report analyzing the Ontario grid in 2017.
If you look at Table 1, you will find that nuclear costs between hydro and wind while gas and solar cost more. This is one example but it does illustrate that nuclear is not necessarily the most expensive. Things have improved for renewables since then but I believe they have for nuclear also.
That page shows nuclear being way more expensive than photovoltaic solar with batteries, more expensive than wind power and more expensive than coal. So it exactly backs up my point.
The graph on the global studies page does seem to indicate that. However, if you actually read the data and how the graph was prepared, it uses one dataset for renewables and a different dataset for nuclear and coal. Additionally, these numbers significanly differ from the IEA data which shows that nuclear is one of the least expensive. As I said in a comment below, there are other, more localized studies that show nuclear is one of the cheaper ways to produce electricity. I would hesitate to say that nuclear is the cheapest option since there are different studies with different results, but to claim that it is the most expensive would be just as misguided for the same reasons. At the end of the day, more electricity is needed as countries look to decarbonize there energy needs. Hydro, wind, and solar are effective and renewable but a stable, carbon-free solution is needed where there is insufficient hydro or geothermal and I believe nuclear fits that bill perfectly.
But the IEA is a lobby group. It's not like their numbers have any credibility. Like I said, nuclear is way more expensive by all numbers except fake ones.
How is it a lobby group? Do you have any sources to back up your claim or is it simply based on your bias because you do not agree with the data they put together? Again, even if you discount their data, there are plenty of other studdies that corroborate the fact that nuclear is not the most expensive method of producing electricity, are all of them somehow wrong? What you need to understand is that there are different factors that can be included which can dramatically change whether one way of producing electricity is better or worse. Nuclear has a high up front capital cost but a very low operating cost per MW. Solar and wind are cheap initially but require replacement every 10 years or more and also generally need a way to store energy if they make up a bulk of the grid. If you factor in the lifecycle and energy storage costs, they are comparable to well designed nuclear plants. I am from ontario, and nuclear has been an incredible benefit to the province.
Yup, just like Vegans, environmentalists come up with an answer they like and find some shakie science to back it up.
liberals and their damn SCIENCE
WTF do "liberals" have to do with "environmentalists?" Liberals love exporting polluting activities to China in the name of "free trade."
The Nuclear power industry is not closer to science than any other energy generating industry.
LoL, I'm pretty sure believing that nuclear energy is the path forward to a green new world is SCIENCE.