Regarding wind and mountains. Some perspective from someone from neighboring Tyrol:

The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.

People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.

See this long-form investigation:

https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587327

nimby

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind

Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s

I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.

to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.

I don't doubt the Swiss could do it right technically speaking, as they do everything else, but I guess the economic argument still holds.

Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.

We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)

> I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.

We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.

Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?

Sorry not sure why I wrote Norway rather than Austria!

Obviously Norway has massive amounts of offshore wind potential too

Technically yes, but also no. The European electricity market have way, way to many rules and caveat to draw any conclusion, especially France with ARENH and other distortions.

It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.

I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.

Sure wish the UK could get some of this cheap renewable energy you're referencing.

That turns out not to be the case.

France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.

Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.