[rcMgD2BwE72F]

By the time any new nuclear reactor is designed, built and turned on, we'll certainly have many new/more ways to store energy for longer time (e.g new battery chemistry, hydrogen…).

Here in France, half of our nuclear reactors are now off (and we had to turn on some old coal plants because of many unexpected technical issues). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

The new EPR (Flamanville) continues to be delayed and the one in Finland that just went live has been shut down last week. Also, we may have to reduce the power of many of our plants that are built along rivers because we won't be able to cool them off during droughts.

It's much easier and safer to install renewables now (as we just started with offshore wind) that bet on nuclear. It's also quite difficult to envision relying on Niger and Kazakhstan to supply uranium in the long term…

[melling]

We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades.

The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-war-europe-turns-to-...

Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc?

We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

> We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades.

Yes, it really made sense for De Gaulle to launch the French civil nuclear program in 1969 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_programme_nucl%C3%...

But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue. And by the time we hit such limits, we'll have many more long term storage options.

I'm not against nuclear (it's fine) but let's not pretend we're still in The Glorious Thirty.

>The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine.

Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants.

>Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc?

We're not waiting https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2021/executive-summar... but we could do much, much more with renewables.

>We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.

We're also talking about being carbon neutral and retiring all nuclear power plants in France by 2050, so… https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...

[melling]

“we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables ”

If this were the case, we wouldn’t be starting all these coal plants.

“Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants.”

Yes, so coal, with its large greenhouse emissions, is still used instead of renewables

[macspoofing]

>But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue.

Really? 'Easily' and 'cheaply'? So even with massive cultural pressure to move to renewables, somehow we don't want to move to a cheaper energy source? You sure about that?

What if ... we can't actually replace fossil fuels with wind/solar.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

You write about "massive cultural pressure to move to renewables" but what about all the money to be lost by the fossil fuel industry? Billions of € coming every year in deep pockets weight definitely more than the "pressure" of a Greta, a few Extinction Rebellion members and some ecologists/socialists.

Let's look at the UK, between 2000 to 2021 Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-nuclear-output-falls... (3rd chart):

- renewables went from 3 to 40%

- imports: 3.6 to 7.6%

- nuclear: 22 to 14%

- oil & gaz: 40.1 to 39.7%

- coal: 31.7 to 1.9%

Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):

UK electricity component of the consumer prices index (in real terms 2010=100): 68.1 to 128.2 (source https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...)

Can't find the exact same series for France but you can compare the two between 2010 and 2020 here and see a comparable trend: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/d40f8154-...

We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...: "As of May 2022, the project is two years late and the expected cost is £25–26 billion,[2] 50% more than the original budget from 2016" Oops!

[macspoofing]

>Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):

Just to get our terms in-line, renewables typically include hydro-electric. Hydro-electric is a great power-source if you have the geography for it. My province of Ontario, between Nuclear and Hydro, pretty much only derives 5% of power from fossil fuels. The problem is, there aren't any more places to dam to generate hydro. So that's done.

And yeah, there is a ceiling on how much wind/solar you can handle as a percentage of your power-mix because you need to rely on base-load to bridge the intermittency of wind and solar. I don't know what that percentage is ... maybe it's 40%, maybe it's 60% - but it's going to be somewhere in that range.

>We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising.

It doesn't matter if they are free! You're not replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar because you still need to run your economy when the sun isn't shinning or the wind isn't blowing. You'll need base-load from somewhere else. Nuclear is actually terrible for that because it can't spin up and spin-down on-demand. Hydro and Natural gas are perfect for that, but like I said, if you don't have the geography for hydro, you're stuck with natural gas.