Mixing electricity with transport and heating in a single metric is such a dishonest argument you have to be as intellectually bankrupt as an anti-nuclear ecologist to make it.

Interesting to see they have data for Russia now. I think that's new.

It’s fairly disingenuous to mix both actually when they don’t mingle. Especially when you consider that both heating and transportation are going in the direction of using more electricity which is actually favorable to the French choice.

France, unusually, actually does, or at least did, use significant amounts of plutonium (a combo of decommissioned weapons and nuclear reprocessing output) in nuclear energy generation, but yeah, primarily uranium.

And because solar and wind power boost sales of gas turbine power plants that can spin fast enough to react for the wind and solar instability

> Germany is more renewable but more expensive than France

No, germany is more renewable but it's also more coal, any time there's no wind the coal plants start up. And they burn lignite (because that's what in germany e.g. that's what the Baggers strip mine).

As a consequence, Germany's electricity emissions are absolute garbage: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/12mo

It's not as bad as Poland which basically runs entirely off of coal, but it's absolutely at the bottom of the european barrel.

Also electricity storage still isn't much of a thing (and while germany has two pumped hydro station they have very little capacity), so in periods of high winds germany actually pays its neighbours to take electricity off its grid so it doesn't collapse (at this point it has hundreds of hours of negative spot prices every year).

Which is getting problematic because increase in wind generation in said neighbours means the issue is spreading as they too need to get rid of their wind production at those times.

Germany may use more renewables in volume, but it is absolutely dirtier than in France. Their electrical mix makes use of lots of natural gas and lignite coal, the worst kind, both expensive and very dirty.

You can say whatever you want when discussion the cost of nuclear in France because of the structure of its nuclear industry. Part of it comes from the government’s budget, so depending on your point of view it can be accounted for differently. Then, there are externalities (pollution, greenhouse gases, etc). And then there are strategic aspects and associated costs. The alternative in the 1970s was skyrocketing oil, which is much more costly at the planet’s level, and was on track to be much more costly at the country’s level as well. And in the meantime, consumers got reasonably cheap and clean electricity for decades.

Skimming your source, I would not trust it very much.