Nuclear technology is a dead end. Renewables and saving energy is the future. Nuclear and fossil are in the same boat. They are both more risky and have huge hidden costs that the general public and future generations will have to bear. The only good reason to go nuclear these days is if you want the bomb, like Iran.
Interestingly, it is the same people who supported fossil in the past who are still promoting nuclear today. Those who have always warned against fossil fuels are usually the ones who recommend a complete switch to renewable energies. That should give one pause for thought.
Nuclear and intermitent energy sources have no place in the same sentence.
Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this. At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage. Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that.
Funny story I like to tell here when nuclear chat come up: this summer (in France) they had to stop some nuclear plant because of the heat, which was causing the river used to cool the reaction to over heat. Right when people needed plenty of electricity for A/C. At least solar was there and working at it's best when we needed it ^^ (this is just for trolling the "renewable are not there when we need it" discourse ;) )
Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy. But not matter what we do, we should target using less energy, because the only clean energy is the one we don't have to produce. I think that's the thing people miss (volontarily I think) when they answer anti nuclear discourse. Insulating homes and and designing cities so that people don't have to use cars, rather than producing more and more nuclear reactors doesn't seem dumb to me, no matter what's your opinion on nuclear itself.
Germany and Belgium’s net electricity imports from France for 2024 are 27 TWh, which dwarf anything imported from Germany to France. [0]
If anything, this only showed that renewables and nuclear actually work very well together and relying on just one of both is shortsightedness and bad planing.
I don't disagree with this point of view. Then the debate remain: should we (France) create more nuclear power plants now, or invest in reducing energy consumption and adding more renewables to the mix.
France was a net exporter of electricity all summer so no idea of what you are talking about. Slowing down some nuclear plants due to this kind of external condition is fully expected. They are not stopped by the way just slowed down. Nuclear is modulable.
People barely use A/C in France by the way.
> Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy
Storage is a short term solution. Batteries are ok to manage intra-day variation, two days at most. Long term storage of electricity plainly doesn't exist. Saying some storage solution will somehow at some point solve the issue of intermittency is at best wishful thinking, at worst a dramatic lack of risk management.
Before someone asks how China is doing it, I will answer the question: they are not. Despite China being much larger and thus being able to somehow compensate variation by having more production sites, they are using battery storage for short term variation but have to rely on expensive and polluting small thermal power plants when energy is lacking. It's a stop gap while they build a ton of nuclear power plants.
People do use A/C more and more in France for obvious reasons, even in the northern part (it has been the trend in the south already for a while now).
I'm not sure what I said is incompatible with being a net exporter? There was a lot of sun and heat, they had to shutdown some nuclear power plants, but the overall electricy production was doing fine, because they did not have to shutdown all the plants (but how about in a few years with even hotter weather?) and obviously solar was doing well.
And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Personally my intuition is that more distributed / local energy and also which doesn't have to rely on a state monopoly is better and more resilient (ask Ukraine) so I'd put my money on storage.
> And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years.
Things don’t magically stop at some point. Not in 2030, not in 2050, not even when we reach net zero.
The question now is do we think it’s easier to reach and sustain net zero using a grid composed of renewable which we have no idea how to scale, don’t know how to manage and have no good solution for the inter-seasonal variation or using nuclear for which we already know how to do all that and we just need to scale up construction.
Well, personally, I think the rational answer is clearly obvious.
You choose to underline the issues of renewables (which are real) and to ignore the ones of nuclear, some of them I mentioned in my previous message, which indeed makes the choice easy and obvious. Taking into account all the parameters requires more head scratching.
"Several commentators, business leaders and academics have identified that 1970 deal as a significant fork in the road of the Cold War, as it established a mutual basis for economic cooperation between Russia and western Europe."
There are certainly different opinions on that.
Gas imports started long ago and in the cold war that approach was working to some extend.
> Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
That statement is plain wrong:
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
In 2013 about 300TWh of electricity came from fossil fuels, 92TWh from nuclear. In 2024 153TWh from fossil fuels and 0 from nuclear. So fossil fuels declined by 147TWh while nuclear only by 92TWh. Claiming that fossil fuels replaced nuclear is ridiculous, even after repeating it hundreds of times.
You can claim that keeping nuclear could have sped up the transition, but the inflexible nuclear plants could also have prevented people from investing in renewables, since the economics are worse if there is energy that is supplied permanently regardless of the price. Nuclear and renewables don't mix well.
You are entirely missing the point. The issue is what do you do when you have no renewable because it’s the winter and there is no sun and no wind. German answer to that - like it or not - is building gas fired power plants and using coal in the meanwhile. That and buying a ton of nuclear energy from France a fact you are conveniently forgetting.
The ratios you quote are meaningless. The issue is that it can’t scale so as to fully decarbonise the grid. Thankfully the current German government seems to finally have seen the light.
'no sun and no wind' is not actually a thing that happens. What happens is less sun during the day and more or less wind in different places in Europe. This is a problem that can be solved through a combination of excess capacity, long distance transmission of energy, and storage, affordably and with existing technology. It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work, and Europe is rapidly moving towards that. Gas turbines are a reasonable stop-gap which will slowly get pushed out of generation as the proportion of renewables and storage grows.
> It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work
It’s far from obvious to me.
There are literally no exemple of one ever running and some of the technological challenges are still open questions at the moment.
I generally think proponents of renewables are overselling the idea and significantly minimising the challenges they pose at scale. They definitely have a place in the energy mix but I don’t personally believe they are the solution.
Mostly renewable has already been achieved, 100% renewable is on track and economically feasible.
In December 2021, South Australia set a new record for renewable energy generation and resilience, after running entirely on renewable energy for 6.5 consecutive days.
In 2022, it was stated that South Australia could soon be powered by only renewable energy.
70 per cent of South Australia's electricity is generated from renewable sources.
This is projected to be 85 per cent by 2026, with a target of 100 per cent by 2027.
And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest. But H2 is only viable once renewable production exceeds demands during long stretches of time. Otherwise it is always better to use the energy directly or use short term storage (batteries) which are also growing exponentially: https://battery-charts.de/battery-charts/
Sorry, you are all emotion and provide wrong statements. What I wrote directly contradicted your statements and proved them wrong, but now you say they are missing the point? Reducing fossil fuel consumption by 50% within 10 years is an achievement. There are always things that could be done in a better way. But let's be real here.
That is kind of the point of having an integrated grid.
But 19TWh. While producing 470TWh. 4%. That is not ... a lot. And in 2022 Germany exported 5.5TWh and had to restart coal plants when the French nuclear plants were in trouble. So what? That what a grid is for.
H2 has been the alleged long term solution for decades while barely progressing at all. Even in aviation where it’s seemingly the only solution we have, it’s stagnating.
If you look at who is pushing H2, you will see that it’s mostly fossil fuel companies who want to prop up gas because as you rightfully pointed out "And gas plants are what is closed to H2 and can be switched over easiest."
> So what? That what a grid is for.
It’s going to be hard to reach net zero while burning coal and if the actual solution is importing nuclear energy from somewhere else while pretending it doesn’t happen, it would be simpler to just straight up go for nuclear.
> Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants.
Germany is constantly reducing gas consumption.[1] From 2000-2024 it reduced electricity generation from coal by 61%.[2]
> How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this.
Only details are open. (Compared to the open question of long term storage of nuclear wast these are very minor problems.) The general strategy is clear: use constantly available renewables (offshore wind, geothermal), connect distant regions for mutual compensation, energy storage.
Personally I think it neglegible if a very small percentage of fossil technology were held in reserve for emergency power generators.
> At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage.
We are in a transition period. It is impossible to suddenly move to complete renewables. Responsible for the rather slow progress are not those people who pushed for the switch to renewables a long time ago, but those who wanted to drag it out as long as possible. These advocates of fossil fuels were the same individuals and companies that wished to extend the use of nuclear energy.
> Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
Since September 2022 Germany imported no gas from Russia.[3] Meanwhile, the nuclear industries of France remains the sole buyer of enriched uranium from Russia in the EU. Admittedly, it has considerably reduced its imports from Russia itself,[4] but is still heavily dependent imports from Russia's sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).[5] The same applies to the USA.[6]
> With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that.
I do not deny that it is possible to operate a reasonably stable electrical network with dirty energy, apart from the regular shortages in dry summers and during heavy frosts. But Germany is ambitious and is going to show the world that it is possible to do it with clean energy. The nuclear lobbyists fear most that this will be successful. This is the only way to explain why they are attacking Germany so fiercely, even though they could actually sit back and wait to see if it succeeds. They fear for their business.
You should look at what a proper planned all-in nuclear project looks like before commenting..
See Hualong One nuclear project that's operating at ~90% capacity and is ~1/3 of the price of solar, and 2/3 price of wind when comparing the same operation % capacity and taking into consideration the max life length of each technology.
Solar panels and windmills are low density sources - we need a LOT of them to get the job done, and even then you still need base load somehow.
That means a huge amount of extra powerlines and future landfill of defunct panels. Not to mention the very sturdy windmill foundations scattered around the landscape.
Say what you will about nuclear, but all of its negatives are concentrated in a small mass and volume.
The optimal, nom-ideological solution is probably a mix of nuclear, gas, and solar panels.
I find that people with strong, pro fission feelings, but no hard numbers, often preface their opinions on the matter with phrases like 'honestly' or 'objectively' or 'non idealogically'.
Concentration of power production is just one of the problems that renewables / distributed power generation systems solves.
Nuclear and renewables do not like to share a grid. Their attributes do not complement each other at all, despite their differences, because fundamentally both of them are not dispatchable. In practice what happens is either nuclear has enough subsidies to survive or renewables completely wreck the economics of it by supplying way cheaper power most of the time.
Both forms of generation want to be paired with something dispatchable, either gas turbines or energy storage. A mix of renewables and nuclear is a mix that is weaker than the sum of its parts, not stronger.
solar panels actually decrease load on power lines. every house with solar panels on it reduces the amount of power the grid needs to bring to that house
In that case, yes. But for solar farms, it's the opposite.
That's why I think we should end up with:
- gas plants: easy and cheap to spin up, can provide district heating
- nuclear: squeaky clean, issues are concentrated in one spot, district heating
- solar panels: super cheap, decentralized, and there are lots of opportunities like rooftops and carparks where we are wasting sunlight right now
I just re-read Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (great book if you like hard near-future sci-fi) and that has the idea of solar stations in geostationary orbit and beaming power to where it's needed with a phased-array microwave transmitter on the station, and rectennas where you need them on the ground. We can't do this economically any time soon, but that would be clean, and require no power lines
yes, they are worse for the grid, depending on how you define worse.
One interpretation is that solar adds variability to the generation side of the equation and managing that variability is currently a question without a clear answer.
Power line capacity is designed around the maximum power that must be delivered. Solar power by itself reduces the mean, and possibly the minimum as well, but never the maximum.
In some places the annual peak demand is for summertime cooling, but in others the annual peak demand is for wintertime heating. It's too strong to say "never [reduce] the maximum" as the parent post did, but there are substantial regions where solar power can't reduce the needed power line capacity.
You do not, ever, need base load power. Base load power is by definition power generation that does not follow the demand curve because it is uneconomical to do so. In this way it is entirely similar to solar and wind in that it cannot, by definition, fill the entire demand for power and it needs to be completemented by dispatchable power sources.
You do need dispatchable power sources (which you can pair with solar/wind/nuclear/...). Recently that has mostly been in the form of gas peaker plants. Today, in most places, the most affordable form of new dispatchable power is batteries paired with excess solar generation.
The real estate costs for solar and wind are not hidden, you pay those costs up front when you install the projects.
You can also decide to look at countries which went 100% renewable and have even better CO2/kWh rating than France (Iceland, Norway, Albania for example).
Yes, situations are different I agree :) my point was just that you can pick and choose what you want to look at. We'll see how things evolve, but it's not very fair to compare the situation of France which did their switch to low carbon energy many years ago, to Germany which is currently doing it. When we have more countries with finished transition to full/mostly renewable, we can compare again.
In the last 90 days France's CO2 footprint is at 78% of Iceland's.
Also, what lessons learned in Iceland, Norway or Albania should we apply in central Europe? We don't have their geothermal and hydro potential (all your examples are not solar+wind but hydro primarily).
> The only good reason to go nuclear these days is if you want the bomb, like Iran.
I‘m sorry but this is just absolute nonsense.
Nuclear energy is the most dense energy type humanity ever produced. To put it in one line with coal and oil is not serious. Not to mention it’s far less hazardous to human health, again compared to fossil fuels. Here is a basic comparison:
> With a complete combustion or fission, approx. 8 kWh of heat can be generated from 1 kg of coal, approx. 12 kWh from 1 kg of mineral oil and around 24,000,000 kWh from 1 kg of uranium-235. Related to one kilogram, uranium-235 contains two to three million times the energy equivalent of oil or coal.
Who really cares about density? The biggest thing that means is that blowing up two or three substations can cripple an entire country’s grid. Distributed energy generation and storage is actually quite strategic for national security.
It’s also massive cherry-picking to just look at refined fuel. For example, H
how many tonnes of ore do you need to mine and process to produce that 1kg of uranium (at least 2.5 tonnes, that is 2500 kg from one random source from a quick google).
But to use your metric, I did work out and find it interesting that the solar panels on my roof, per kg of silicon have produced over 1,400 kWh of electricity (multiply your figures by 0.3 to take into account efficiency from kWh of heat to compare) so far. I estimate almost 28 kg of silicon in my whole array, which has generated over 38 MWh so far, and I expect they will generate at least three times that over their life.
So 4000-5000 kWh(e) per kg of silicon sure comes in a hell of a lot of better than the 2.4 odd for coal or 4 for mineral oil (assuming your figures are correct).
Everyone. If you don’t, then you need to scale. Case in point with renewables. It’s also not cherry-picking, but a well-known fact in physics. Do yourself a favor and look at the source link I posted above.
The thing about blowing up things I will just skip, because it’s not serious. If things go that far, there will be far greater problems than just that. Besides, if that’s your worry why don’t use SMRs then? Russia does.
To your 4000-5000 kWh point, you are not burning silicon here, are you? And a PV is not energy fuel, it’s a device composed of many different materials. I don’t understand your point and I can’t say more than that - my reply to GP was about fossil fuels and nuclear anyway. Not sure why you decided to jump into renewables here.
this website is filled with people who believe that the future source of energy is entirely renewable energy. That is false, as many european countries show.
I live in a part of Canada with mostly nuclear energy and i am thankful that my electricity rates are low. This helps me reduce emissions via heat pumps and EVs. I don't need solar panels and most people do not either.
You are correct, the future is mostly renewable energy where feasible, with a combination of nuclear and hydro.
Interestingly, it is the same people who supported fossil in the past who are still promoting nuclear today. Those who have always warned against fossil fuels are usually the ones who recommend a complete switch to renewable energies. That should give one pause for thought.