[lispm]

> Germany has been taking coal offline after taking nuclear offline; and are replacing coal by gas (so they depend even more on Russia) instead of replacing it by nuclear or renewable

Germany's Energiewende is a many decade long plan with going beyond 80+ renewable energy for electricity in 2050.

The Energiewende is not just about CO2 reductions, it is about making renewable energy viable in an industrialized country. This has impact for all of us. Not just in Germany.

If the US had a forward looking government and population, we would much further along the way. The energy consumption in the US is twice as high per capita as in Germany and there is no credible energy policy beyond fracking gas. The current US president is a coal lover and he was voted for that into his office. Imagine the amount of research money and infrastructure money the US COULD invest into a new energy systems - instead it wastes money on wars, consumption and trillion dollar deficits.

> investing into nuclear too alongside renewable (rather than instead) seems the safer bet

That's why it has to go and somebody has to invest to make that viable. Germany is doing exactly that.

> Focusing on closing nuclear first (like Germany did!)

Germany did focus on renewable energy and the most incompatible industry had to go first.

Renewable energy is not about nuclear and renewable side by side - this won't work.

Nuclear is a huge state owned monopolistic system. Renewable is market oriented, decentralized, non-monopolistic. The break-up of the old system was inevitable to jump-start the new energy system.

It's a complete paradigm shift like going from Mainframe computing to a distributed Internet.

[Gondolin]

Germany's goal is laudable, but even if it manages to go full renewable by 2050 that's still 40 years of green house gas emissions it could have avoided had it gone both nuclear and renewable.

Nuclear can be made smaller (molten salt reactor, but I do admit that there are huge challenges for that too), and more flexible. Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's, but France's can be quite flexible: for those of you who can read French <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1102620969808658432.html> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.

[lispm]

> molten salt reactor

will have zero impact in the next three decades. There is no market offering and no buyer.

No one is investing in yet another fuel cycle and nuclear technology. There are no reactors of scale and there is no industry surrounding it.

> Germany's plant were not as flexible as France's

Germany had a few flexible nuclear plants. But all old.

> a variation of 10GW of nuclear production in a few hours.

The result is that France has invested very little in renewable energy in the last decades and created a very inefficient and state owned energy system.

France's centralized nuclear state owned energy system and distributed multi-producer/owner renewable energy are largely incompatible systems. Proof: the lack of investments into renewable in the last decades in France.

The main question is this: where are CURRENT investments going. Not nuclear, but renewable. This future had been made possible by investments like the German Energiewende, while other countries did invest in mostly nothing. They even failed to bring nuclear forward (-> US). The US sits on a bunch of outdated reactors and not much idea how to replace them economically with newer and better ones.

[pfdietz]

The big trend in the US was the switch to natural gas (a trend now ended by the rise of renewables and soon storage.)

Natural gas had the big advantage of being burned in combustion turbines, which are cheaper than other thermal cycles. Heat exchangers are costly, but a simple cycle turbine doesn't need any (if it doesn't have a regenerator).

The biggest nuclear operator here (Exelon) is shit talking new nuclear, putting their investment into CO2 capture, renewables, and storage.