You're not counting the energy outflows from France to neighboring countries.

Also, France gets 70% of its energy from nuclear, not 40%.

I think you included transportation in your stats: planes, cars, trucks and boats. The electrical mix in France includes only 8% from fossil fuels, of which 7% come from natural gas. The rest is mostly nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and solar. In that order.

France also regularly sells its surplus to neighboring countries.

France is simultaneously one of the most populated countries in the EU and the of the top transitioned countries, it does make a difference

CO2 equiv from https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/24h:

France: 40g/kWh Germany 557g/kWh

If the goal is decarbonation, using wind+solar is alright (renewables are a bigger part of the mix in Germany) but burning gas and lignite when there's no sun or wind is not.

Ah, the well loved trick of playing with statistics to make something look good.

The current carbon intensity per KWh in Germany is 526g, vs 50g for France.

The average yearly carbon intensity per KWh in Germany, is 354g.

So, either the rest 40% of domestically generated power are hyper-polluting, or the other statistics don't hold up.

Either way, with such a high carbon intensity, there is nothing to brag about.

And that's before entering the discussion about how the repercussions of the poor long-term German energy plan is currently killing their economy, and, indirectly, their social fabric.

This could be very misleading

> net power grid imports are less than 5% (17% imports vs. 12.5% exports in 24H1)

depending on when those happen. If they import French electricity whenever the wind is taking a break from blowing, that prevents craptons of pollution (including, but far from exclusively, CO2) from the massive German coal plant I live near to. If it's more random, say if it's just helping with some peaks when everyone's making bratwurst and coal currently doesn't cut it, then it's not reducing them from running

There are also times where we hear electricity prices are negative or near zero for a time, afaik usually caused by too much wind-based production. Exporting that may balance the thing out so that the net value is near zero

I'm sure it'll be some mix of those and other scenarios, but I'm not sure that looking at the net result says very much about whether nuclear electricity exports helped reduce emissions in surrounding countries like Germany. I'm more inclined to say the claim of the person you're responding to is likely correct (though I'd say "helpful to be" part of the mix, rather than "needs to be")

Net balance over long time periods isn't very interesting: it doesn't tell you what happens on the market and who needs the trade to happen. What you need to look at is whether these exports are correlated with peaks in production or peaks in usage.

What storage are you referring too? I see residential ones in houses but absolutely nothing of state-scale, which is necessary to keep industries and services running.

Materials used for current storage technologies are expected to see demand skyrocket. We’re still to see the renewables going further than the residential proof of concept on a society scale.

God bless plutonium.

The result speaks for themselves, Germany still hasn't reached France 90s levels of emissions.

New renewable installations are getting cheaper, but are still far from being numerous enough to overcome their terrible load factor and enable switching off some baseline production plants. And storage at a grid level is pretty much inexistant, except for a couple of pumped hydro plants.

There is a significant mismatch between reality and the kind of headlines we see in tech-focused media. These hype future products as if they were already widely available, which creates a false idea of the actual situation in the real world.

You'd need to be able to store WEEKS of electricity to make wind+solar work.

Currently, battery grid-scale storage stores seconds.

You'd need an increase of several orders of magnitude for this to work.

Even if manufacturing costs were magically 0, the amount of lithium, copper and other materials required would be unsustainable.

It's not going to happen.

> nuclear power is super expensive

That is debatable, nuclear power can be really cheap when managed correctly. See for example Ontario, Canada or France during the 70s-90s.

Many nuclear power plants can have life times of more than 8 decades and only the initial build and licensing is the expansive part, so if you average the cost over the total life time it is rather cheap.

https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...

> relies on finite uranium resources

https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

> there is no safe solution to store the waste

If its so unsafe, why has there not been a single major accident with used fuel from civilian nuclear power plants? We have been using hundreds of NPPs for decades, yet not a single fatality.

The truth is, nuclear waste can be and is managed safely.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3

“Super expensive” for who builds them, or "super expensive" for the end user paying their electricity bill?

Also, there are safe solutions to store nuclear waste. They are not 1.0e31% secure, but many other kinds of power plants carry significant risks [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmington_Mine_disaster

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Connecticut_power_plant_e...

> super expensive

cheaper than dealing with climate change

> finite uranium resources

we're not going to run out anytime soon, unlike oil

> no safe solution to store the waste

yes, there are

It's not the perfect solution for sure. But solar/wind/water isn't going to get us to where we need to be fast enough.

One day we'll figure our fusion and can shut down all our fission plants.

Keep in mind that we should be comparing "super expensive" with climate adaptation consequences, as well as factoring in that e.g. Europe could collaborate and drive down reactor costs with economies of scale where we don't all need to independently reinvent how to build these things

I'm happy for any energy (not just electricity) mix that ends up with a reasonable total cost, adding up current investments needed and future adaptation measures. The problem with ruling out a clean and safe energy source for irrational fears is that it delays net zero (higher future adaptation costs) and requires spending more on alternative solutions to guarantee a steady power supply (higher current investments)

Wind and solar are currently much cheaper per kWp (opportunistic production) and so it seems like the quicker way to net zero, and during the first bit (where we are currently at) that's definitely true. The problem shifts when we want to actually stop using things like gas to make up the difference. Afaik we need to go quite a way beyond what cost-effective pumped hydro locations can supply in most of Europe, so we need to look beyond 2030 and think what power sources we need to have ready by, say, 2040 or 2050, start making specific plans, and break ground on whatever solution is the best compromise

(I'm expecting some people to object to saying nuclear is not rationally dangerous. Please, prove me wrong! I'm happy to update my opinions based on non-cherry-picked data. I've previously looked into the cost in human health (not just deaths) of different energy sources, including dependencies such as uranium mining which is among the worst aspects. The only reliable data I've been able to find shows fission on par with renewables — iirc tending towards being safer, but probably not beyond the error margins due to the low percentage of nuclear energy)

Edit: on the other hand, I'm afraid that this nuclear discussion (especially with germans, I say that as a foreigner living in Germany so I've heard different perspectives) only serves to divide the people who at least understand there is something we should be doing about climate change. I'm happy to compromise if that lets us finally settle on a concrete plan that'll land us in a place we want to be

What other clean solution for variable reliable power do you know of?

I can't say if this question is asked in good faith.

Pretty obviously it's better than what the other European countries have been doing.

France being about 1% of world's population, any effort won't make a huge dent in a global phenomenon. Also, that 1% pollutes a lot more than the average, so the efforts made on the electricity front are offset by other issues.

someone could calculate the savings in CO2 emissions over all the power generated by nuclear energy each year in France, since the power stations were built, vs coal plants (which would have been the alternative at the time)