[YesWeWill]

What does it have to do with the US? This is about the EU only. The EU only put all focus on "green" energy and then tried to solve the problems it created with fossil fuels while forgetting about or even actively working against nuclear. What the US did has nothing to do with that.

[jltsiren]

The EU put focus on replacing coal with natural gas, as that was the cheapest way of reaching their emission goals. Similar reductions would have been far more expensive with renewables or nuclear. Economics beat geopolitics, because the dominant ideology in the EU is using regulated markets to achieve policy goals.

This year geopolitics struck back and made the rational economic choice a poor one in retrospect.

[YesWeWill]

It was never a rational economic choice, everybody in the eastern EU knew this is coming. While we were sounding the alarms and pointing to Georgia in 2008, Westerners were busy mashing "reset buttons" with uncle Putin. Not even 2014 invasion to Ukraine changed their minds and now they act surprised?

You could've simply read the official Russian doctrine. "oil is for profits, gas is for political control" - they even published it on the web FFS.

[jltsiren]

"Rational" does not mean "smart", "good", or "beneficial to the society".

It was the choice businesses made, because they believed it was the best way to make profit in the energy market. The EU agreed on emission quotas and set up the emission trade system, in order to let the market choose how to reduce emissions. The market chose natural gas, and the politicians allowed that, because they believed in the wisdom of the market.

[YesWeWill]

I don't believe that for a minute - since now the market is choosing nuclear the moment the EU allowed it to be considered green. We were waiting for it for a decade with projects in hand and now there are entire new reactors being built, all so suddenly. Experts from my country were lobbying for that at least since 2008. The EU commission has chosen feels instead of evidence and nobody will ever pay for that - except Ukrainians with their lives and poorer Europeans with their savings.

And BTW this isn't just about the market - our state wanted to support nuclear but the EU sued it for unfair competition. Oh no, the German electricity producers might make less profit from their Russian gas, what would we do?!?!?

[rowanajmarshall]

> The EU only put all focus on "green" energy and then tried to solve the problems it created with fossil fuels while forgetting about or even actively working against nuclear.

I'm not sure that's true. The EU (25%) as a whole has more nuclear energy than the US (19%). About half of EU countries use nuclear power, keeping in mind almost half of EU countries have less people than Massachusetts.

Remember, the EU doesn't generally run energy policy. The individual countries do. If anything, it was a lack of commitment to green energy that led to this.

[YesWeWill]

The EU assigns money it takes from the states - money the pro-nuclear states would've used for their nuclear energy, but since it was appropriated by the EU and then assigned by its own rules that were constructed to rule out nuclear energy, they couldn't. So our pro-nuclear state has huge fields of solar arrays that everybody here hates because it replaced natural parks and makes us more reliant on gas powerplants, and the our/EU money was taken by gangsters, we call them the "solar barons" - great, thanks EU.

[rowanajmarshall]

For France (and I imagine it's similar for other countries), EU contributions are a smidgen under 1% of GDP. I can't imagine that makes the decisive difference here. And in any case, since the EU still gets more of its energy from nuclear than the US does they'd be doing a piss-poor job of it.

In fact, looking at the figures, the only countries worldwide that get more energy from nuclear than the EU _and_ aren't part of the EU are Ukraine (55%), South Korea (28%), Switzerland (29%), and Armenia (25%). And both Switzerland and Ukraine are synchronised with the greater European grid!

[YesWeWill]

Ukraine has been synchronized only very recently and it's much more like an emergency interconnect. Zaporozhi Power Plant is under attack.

[rowanajmarshall]

But it still shows there's more nuclear energy floating around the EU and it's neighbours than any other region of the world.