It might be the cheapest if you factor in the costs of climate change, as responsible economists have insisted for decades & the fossil fuel industry has spent billions fighting
It was kind of a statistical tie the last time I looked at this (wind was possibly slightly in the lead out of the three in terms of CO2 per KWh) but the wind and solar numbers seemed to be trending downwards over time.
2014 data from an IPCC meta-analysis here roughly supports this [1]. 800 gCO2-eq/kWh for coal, 490 for gas, 48 for solar, 12 for nuclear, 11 for wind.
To be clear, any non-carbon energy source can decarbonize almost to zero assuming all the lifecycle activities are converted to the non-carbon energy as well. One exception might be hydro with it's potential biogenic methane emissions.
Germany uses ~30% Coal in its energy mix, France less than 2%.
Your argument is misleading at best, and targeted misinformation at worst.
Since you've repeated the same argument at least 5 times by now, even though others have informed you about the wrong conclusion, I must assume it is meant to misinform.
Except that solar power isn’t an effective measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector. Nuclear is far more effective as the comparison between France and Germany shows with Germany emitting _seven_ times the emissions as France in their energy sector.
Because Germany burns seven times as much fossil fuel as France.
This tells us that France has a cleaner energy mix than Germany, but I don't think this cherry-picked example contributes much to the discussion otherwise, no matter how many times you repeat it.
That's an incredibly disingenuous comparison; Germany gets just 10% of its power from solar, while France gets about 75% of its power from nuclear. Once again, this is not some sort of demonstration that "solar doesn't reduce greenhouse emissions," it's an indication that people need to start building pumped storage.
I think your argument could be good if nuclear had any chance in the future. Unfortunately though, it hasn't. The complexity, risk and political cost make it unlikely that we will see a nuclear renaissance. Even countries like the US that can be very market driven, see much higher levels of investment in renewables including solar than nuclear.
I think a some of that is because of the way nuclear has been deployed. Similar to reason the US Navy has been offered a buy 1 get one half off deal for it's air craft carriers. Using standardized designs and the same labor force to build multiples of the same thing is exponentially cheaper than doing one off designs/contracts.
There is of course a limit to this effect, for nuclear there's site specific engineering/design that has to happen which you don't have for ships.
But the savings in workforce cost can absolutely be realized in nuclear if a large enough pipeline of projects is developed which it looks like the French power company EDF is doing.