Nuclear is proportionally expensive for one because we build a lot less and lose insititional knowledge and manufacturing capacity. Secondly because of ridiculous legislation and europes extreme ability to fuck with it politically. Thirdly because we don't count the gas plant to cover the intermitency of the renewables as part of the cost and if they'd take those out they'd find they run out of options for the cheap storage options as they become a larger share of the grid nor did they drew out the lifetime cost over the full length of a nuclear plants lifetime (shit gets replaced in the meantime)

At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections) But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades. I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.

This gets repeated again and again. They are not in conflict with each other - both need to be done in tandem. It is not a this or that strategy - it is an all of the above strategy.

Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.

There will always be a need for on-demand power. Renewables are great, but cannot deal with peaks as easily and capacity is dependent on weather.

The politicians in Germany went to great length to promote natural gas as the green technology to be combined with renewables, a strategy they succeed in the European Parliament and still seem to follow even when the fires roams and the pipelines get blown up. There is no seasonal grid battery storage in central and northern Europe, and outside of a few hundred household sized experiment, no grid storage is being built.

Looking at the platforms of political parties who oppose nuclear in a nearby country like Sweden, all of them highlight how thermal power plants are necessary to support further expansion of renewable energy, and those thermal power plants burn some form of fossil fuels. This include the Swedish green party.

What EU need is a ban on fossil fuels in the energy grid. Without that natural gas there is no need to buy gas from current war zones and their participants, and it would significantly decrease emissions. As long as people who oppose nuclear also agree to stop using thermal power plants, same as with the ban on ICE cars that will come into action in a few years, then the discussion of nuclear vs renewables + battery will be a fair one with everyone playing by the same rules.

Naturally in the south part of EU there is little reason to use nuclear plants. Energy demand correlates with solar production, and the need for seasonal storage is minimal. Sadly the same can not be said about central and northern Europe where wind speeds are the current dominant factor when it come to supply of energy, but seasons dictate demand. The size of storage needed for a harsh winter is magnitudes more expensive currently than reducing the need through nuclear, but that will never be tested since what countries there are actually building right now are more thermal power plants to address the issue of low supply during periods of low energy production from wind.

> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage?

Recent report on restarting German nuclear:

> The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s.

* https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german...

* PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...

I wonder how much battery you could install in a typical nuclear site. Maybe even stacked; if we make an apples-to-apples comparison in materials and say we can use the same amount of concrete and metal, could probably have several levels of batteries. Except no water needed, and no waste risks.

> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing.

Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear.

[1] https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-sy...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

It depends on how much you value land use and care about the knock on effects of the associated mining. I’d rather figure out how to build out nuclear cheaply like South Korea and China and use more land for wild space. The per hectare land use of nuclear is minuscule.

> wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage?

How about taking the money spent on fossil energies and invest it in both nuclear and renewables?

Just replacing expensive fossil energy with cheap renewables and storage doesn't help. The problem is Jevons paradox. Cheaper energy means more consumption.

A sensible global policy could be:

- Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas.

- Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want.

- Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only.

Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots.

Our children will be boiling frogs and angry.

I think the point of this question is that the Green party of Germany chose in 2003 that closure of nuclear power plants was more important than global warming.

They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023.

Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany.

European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise.

And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere.

I think that is what is meant by that question.

Of course it would, but there's less profit for capitalists to make with distributed sovereign renewable energy.

30 years ago the answer was nuclear. Not today, it's just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer.

One problem with renewables is that they rely a lot on electronics, which relies a lot on petrochemicals (just to build them) and on globalisation. In a world without abundant oil, can we keep producing and maintaining as many solar panels as we need?

Nuclear is different in that regard.

> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing

Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.

Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.

Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest

> should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account

Obviously, each individual should have a right to emit a certain amount of GHGs independently from the size of the country he happens to be born in. So the correct list is this (2024 data [1]). Quite surprising in places (e.g. the position of the UK, Australians emitting GHGs at the level of a petro-state, and Canadians too, well above the US).

    | Country              | MtCO2e/ capita
    | Qatar                | 54.54
    | Kuwait               | 38.14
    | Bahrain              | 35.13
    | United Arab Emirates | 25.62
    | Oman                 | 24.02
    | Saudi Arabia         | 22.79
    | Australia            | 22.26
    | Canada               | 19.76
    | Russia               | 18.02
    | United States        | 17.34
    | New Zealand          | 15.59
    | South Korea          | 12.83
    | Ireland              | 11.86
    | China                | 10.81
    | Poland               | 9.28
    | Belgium              | 9.15
    | Netherlands          | 8.35
    | Germany              | 8.17
    | Italy                | 6.32
    | Spain                | 6.16
    | Brazil               | 5.93
    | France               | 5.68
    | United Kingdom       | 5.63

Germany is in Europe and the economist is about Europe, so it makes sense to look at high emitters in Europe, no?

Also, while it's important to look at the global picture, let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe. Poland is pretty bad too, especially in the winter. That's not China's or USA's fault.

Germany is singled out because decided to close their safe and well functioning zero emission power plants for no good reason, thus exploding their CO2 emissions.

Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!

The reason Germany gets singled out is because it was a massive policy misstep and highlights the shortsightedness of the environmental movement. It seems that they have changed their tune about it nuclear - but their entrenched efforts (and concerns in the 80s) killed the last 40 years of nuclear power - arguably inflaming our current CO2 crises by opening the doors wide open for Oil and Gas to fill the void.

In Germany add in that they then needed to rely on Russia to provide natural gas to fill in the void - which drove up the costs of power and made their manufacturing base a little less competitive.... Best intentions don't always prove to be good policy making. That's the TL;DR why Germany gets singled out.

Thats not a property of nuclear power plants but of having been built some 60 years ago when nobody took that into account.

I think that's net zero for electricity only, not net zero for all power generation. It excludes heavy industry and freight shipping, which still have a projected investment window of at least 25 years. Heavy industry in particular would have benefitted from the predictable high-power output of nuclear energy.

> and they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries.

In and around winter? I think that's a fantasy.

> they will likely hit net zero in the next decade at current deployment rates of renewables and batteries.

X to doubt, I'll believe it when I see it, for now they are like a galaxy away from that goal.

And also that'll be even harder to reach if they want to improve their atrociously low electricity heating rate.

You realize that "green energy" in EU is dependent on gas and/or coal? When there's no wind or sun, we will gladly burn gas or coal, and call it green energy.

Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon.

Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear

How can articles on major news sites have typos this bad up for over a month?

"The crisis in France has claimed dozens of lives, with 40 people drowning while attempting to call off from the heat since June 18"

Call off should be "cool off".

And forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't nuclear power plants produce enough energy that they could power their own cooling? Why do they have to rely on the free cooling provided by a river?

Iran. But the ban comes from outside.

[dead]

> Even if we had nuclear fusion, solar+batteries could still win on cost and time to deploy!

In a world with abundant fossil fuels on which globalisation relies.

The question is: what happens when it stops? Can renewables win in a world without abundant oil? We don't know, we haven't tried.

Your link shows the US also decreased their carbon footprint, and a big part of the rest of the world stays kinda stable.

It should be illegal in 2026 to have such a naive view.

co2 per country or capita doesn't mean shit when the world uses China as a factory:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-embedded-in-...

Lets just name names. China. India.