[ZeroGravitas]

And yet both France and Germany plan to move to mostly renewable. Which the French government thinks will save them money. Something that probably wouldn't have been possible without Germany's far sighted leadership on this issue.

I wonder how you could attribute the carbon saved by all the people choosing solar and wind as the current cheapest options to the people who put their money where their mouth was when that was just a projection.

[thrower123]

Right. Far sighted leadership of shutting down perfectly good, clean, nuclear power plants, and trying to replace them with intermittent renewables. That need to be backed up by more reliable alternatives, like strip mining old-growth forests for dirty brown coal to burn in steam generators, or importing electricity from France's nuke plants.

Just brilliant.

[ZeroGravitas]

You're thinking too small.

Climate change and deforestation are global problems, and Germany has helped fund a global solution.

Solar and wind are growing rapidly, they're currently passing the total yearly generation of nuclear but with 30% yearly growth will soon be adding the equivalent of the total nuclear fleet every year.

It is actually brilliant.

If Germany has sacrificed some of their own woodlands to make that happen then that's just more impressive.

[thrower123]

Avoiding nuclear power is just stupid, and shutting down functioning plants is cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you actually care about net effects on the environment, anyway.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I don't know, but I suspect the French government isn't shutting down perfectly good, economical nuclear plants just to spite themselves.

I imagine that the nuclear plants are expensive to maintain since they're getting old. So rather than maintain them, they're probably going to just shut them down. And since new ones are so insanely expensive to build (again, don't know why), it's probably more feasible short term to invest in renewables.

But that's just my suspicion. I know nothing of French politics and very little about energy generation, but a little about finance, politics, and human psychology.

I'd love to know what it costs to maintain the nuclear plants they're shutting down, how much they're spending on renewables, and I'd love to look at it finacially. It's possible it doesn't make sense, and they just want the "green jobs". It's possible none of it makes sense! But I suspect there's some sense in this somewhere.

[thrower123]

As far as I know, the French are not shutting down nuclear plants.

The Germans did shut down operating plants, for political reasons, with the excuse that the capacity would be made up in solar and wind. When that fantasy failed to materialize, they had to fall back on burning more dirty coal.

Lose-lose.

[imtringued]

You're just pulling that out of your ass now. Germany already had enough renewables to compensate for the loss of the nuclear energy. The problem with shutting down nuclear instead of coal is that it canceled out the emission reductions of deploying renewables. The amount of energy being produced by coal remained unchanged for 5 years and so did the emissions but they never added more coal capacity.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

[ZeroGravitas]

The currently announced policy is to reduce nuclear to 50% (from 75%) by 2035 as nuclear plants age out because it's cheaper and easier to replace with renewables. But within the last week they've been saying they haven't made a final decision on building any new plants and still could go 100% non-nuclear renewable if they don't get an explanation of the current cost overruns and are sure it won't happen again.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-france-nuclear/france-may-...