Google "Messmer Plan". France built 65 reactors in 15 years as a reaction to the 70s oil crisis, and now the majority of electricity in France comes from nuclear without any significant dependency on fossil fuels. The only thing that we're lacking is political will to change things.
Yep. Once people experience true hardship like having to keep their house just above freezing in the winter due to the cost of energy - all of a sudden impossible things become quite possible.
The only potential issue here would be if the west had collectively hollowed out its manufacturing base so much as to make surging capacity and capability a generational thing vs. immediate.
Coasting on past success eventually brings stagnation and pain. Hopefully the pain isn’t too horrible for normal folks this time around.
The French energy sector is more than 50% fossil [1]. If France decarbonizes over the next decades, it will be due to renewables, not nuclear. While the government and population have been extremely pro-nuclear for a long time, the economics just don't work out. The current plan is to barely build enough reactors to replace old ones going off-line over the next decades.
That seems to be mostly because of oil use which is coming from transportation. Electrical generation is dominated by nuclear and renewables. Electrification of transport will help, provided they don't generate the additional electricity needed by burning gas or coal...
That's why I used the word electricity and not energy. It isn't perfect, but still much better than the majority if the world and even Europe. The fact that even the French themselves cannot replicate it anymore speaks volumes about the weakness of the current political system. As a counter example, the Chinese can and do.
In 2024, China produced 8 times more electricity from renewables that from nuclear [1], and the renewable share is growing much more quickly. Nuclear is as dead in China as it is elsewhere in the world.
China has a huge advantage over the majority of Europe: abundance of mostly empty land with a lot of sunlight, it's unrealistic in places like Norther Europe. But I'm not talking about nuclear alone, it was the best answer in the 70s and 80s, nowadays we need a healthy mix of nuclear, solar and wind. But above everything else we need a government willing to make significant changes and make them fast.
And now Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 14 years late. Online but not commercially operational.
Their EPR2 fleet are getting an enormously large subsidy at 11 cents kWh CFD for 40 years and interest free loans. Sum freely. With the first reactor online in 2038 of everything goes to plan.
How many trillions in subsidies should we handout to new built nuclear power to ”try for real”?
Or we can just build renewables and storage which is the cheapest energy source in human history.
6-7 years. France built 40 its nuclear reactors in a decade, at 6-7 years per reactor.
Right now China is building reactors at 6-7 years per reactor.
--- start quote ---
Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less.
Every single conventional commercial-scale reactor project in Chinese history has achieved completion in under a decade
Since the start of 2022, China has completed an additional five domestic reactor builds, with their completion times ranging from just under five years to just over 7 years. This continues the consistent completion record of Chinese projects even despite potential disruptions from the intervening COVID-19 pandemic.
China successfully constructed six nuclear reactors in Pakistan in around 5.5-6 years each
The actual lesson here is that beyond a small reserve, the case for nuclear is non existent (unless proponents are willing to stop pretending it isn’t about nuclear weapons).
The same Chinese who in addition to wind and solar are also building many nuclear energy plants of several differing designs, have nuclear already as 20% (?? or so, IIRC) of their supply capacity and intend by plan to keep it that way?
For whatever reason, the Chinese are all for hybrid nuclear / renewables - and keeping modern more efficient coal plants in the picture until they no longer needed.
The "trending flat" is by design, they want coal and nuclear as still available fallback, nuclear also has national security benefits for deterrence, the expansion plans for nuclear (not major amounts more, just steady low growth) are still on their table, just throttled back somewhat for now and ready to ramp up as they choose.
> How does nuclear, an energy source known for needing to run at a very high capacity factor (i.e at max capacity) help with energy spikes?
It's one of the fastest load-following power sources we have. I think only gas power stations are faster. And no, they don't run at full capacity at all times.
You can't ramp up or ramp down any of the renewable sources as quickly. Or you have to insanely overbuild them.
Batteries help to a point, and there are downsides and problems to batteries, too. You want to be as diverse in your power sources and power source backups as possible.
> Well you better go tell the Chinese that they should slow down on wind and solar, clearly they are misinformed about how to run their grid.
Non-sequitur.
China is building out all power sources at tremendous pace. They build both renewables and nuclear. They literally approve 10 new reactors a year on top of all the renewables they also build.
And while they canceled inland
plans after Fukushima, they may still reverse the decision. China is nothing if not pragmatic.
> China is building out all power sources at tremendous pace. They build both renewables and nuclear. They literally approve 10 new reactors a year on top of all the renewables they also build.
Not a non-sequitor. They are building out wind solar and hydro at orders of magnitude more than nuclear.
“Look China is building so much nuclear, we should too.” Is disingenuous and self-serving by the nuclear industry since they don’t acknowledge that their nuclear build out is a rounding error (and a decade behind behind schedule) compared to renewables. If we want to point to China and say we should do what they do, the obvious take away is that renewables are the way to go.
> Right now China is building reactors at 6-7 years per reactor.
Thats China. In Europe, this building speed isnt going to happen anytime soon. The knowledge to build nuclear at that scale isn't in the coutry/continent anymore. You'd have to reteach an entire generation of engineers.
Besides that, part of the point of switching away from oil and gas is at least some independence. Europe isnt known for its nuclear fuel supply so now you're reliant on another country again.
Yes, most solar is produced in China but its about as low maintence as it gets and there is still enough knowledge to produce in Europe.
You are right to point out the astonishing developments in Chinese nuclear reactors technology most people are totally oblivious of. It has been standardized, is seemingly safe and far more efficient due to Chinese technological advancements; however you may be overlooking that the ability, the capacity to do that, to do what France did by installing 56 nuclear reactors due to the last oil shock, takes an industrial capacity that does not seem to really exist anymore in Europe to the same degree. I won’t even get into why that is, because it would simply turn into a book, but suffice to say, it’s a euphemistic, polite “challenge”, so to say.
But people also forget that it still takes nuclear fuel to do any of that, which France/Europe has now also largely lost access to, due to the Niger situation along with cutting itself off from Russia/BRICS. That will at some point become an issue for France/Europe, which the “remilitarizing” EU may even make one of its first contrived America-style military adventures to “protect democracy” or some other manipulative, emotive, contrived lie by the lying Epstein, Mandelson, Brunel Class.
Fun fact: Germany blew up its nuclear energy capacity with voted approval by the current EU Commission President von der Leyen, while she was in the German government ruling coalition … she has described that her own action as a “strategic mistake”. That is who is basically the dictator of Europe, someone who makes self-described “strategic mistakes” of the highest order, multi-generational, rippling, echoing, de facto permanently consequential mistakes.
We do, it's not our fault that the electricity market in the EU is such that the spot price is based on the most expensive kWh produced in the zone we supply to. It sucks that we have to pay high energy prices because Germany fucked up their energy policies, or because Poland is still mostly coal-based.
Nuclear reactors are running, Forsmark, Oskarshamn, and Ringhals are still there and producing 25% of our electricity right at this moment.
So we do, and we are getting ratfucked by the common electricity market in the EU that pushes our prices much higher than what it costs to produce.
Poland plans to enter nuclear power. Three AP1000 reactors at the Choczewo site in the voivodeship of Pomerania. The European Commission granted formal approval for state aid in December 2025, including a capital injection of approximately PLN 60 billion (approximately $17 billion) and a 40‑year contract for difference.
Discussing whose fault it is does not change the fact that a statement such as "we do manage quite well to use green energy for heating during winter in Sweden" is quite questionable. The electricity prices ARE high and they would be significantly lower if we had not decommissioned half of our nuclear reactors
> The electricity prices ARE high and they would be significantly lower if we had not decommissioned half of our nuclear reactors
Where is the source for this statement?
The prices are not set by our producing costs, do you know how electricity is priced in the EU electricity market?
We do manage quite well, if you understood the pricing mechanism you'd know what I meant instead of knee-jerking into the umbrella "but more nuclear!".
Green energy is super useful for heating in winter. At this point heat pumps are better than gas in almost every way unless the temperature is well below freezing. So it's just a matter of electricity which Italy and Belgium can get from the current mix of green energy (wind and even solar) and other forms (nuclear, coal, etc...)