Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
This is a mischaracterization of what happened. The economics got bad because of regulatory pressures, and regulatory pressures increased because of anti-nuclear sentiment, and …
… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.
The fossil fuel industry quietly funneled money to these groups to discredit nuclear which competes with gas/coal for base load. Solar/wind only partially compete because at times they produce nothing so the grid still needs base load (usually "natural" gas these days).
Thanks for all the extra greenhouse gases, Greenpeace!
this is nonsense. Take german plants - zero subsidies for operation, plants were built mostly by private sector.
In France - no CFD's for existing units, plants were constructed by govt for about 150bn. In comparison Germany spent on EEG subsidies double of that and you can see the result in emissions...
Really? Which private sector built nuclear power plants in East Germany? In West Germany most plants were constructed by state-controlled enterprises and there were no expectation of them to ever reach profitability.
And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.
what has installed capacity to do with price? Check recent chinese solar parks prices and power. Normalize that power with chineze weather capacity factor. Do the same for their nuclear which is roughly 2.5bn/unit
China does expand ren more than nuclear but the reason is not economics but the capacity to scale (as well as inland ban)
430 GW a year on 20% (which it is not, as china has lots of desserts with no clouds) would still be a way bigger number than 110 GW that are planned to be reached in a few years.
Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless?
A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?
Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.
Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.
I do see how France and Sweden have lowest GHG emissions in EU by building both nuclear and renewables. I see other countries like Denmark/Germany who decided to go with ren alone. Germany spent on EEG double than entire french nuclear fleet. We can see the results. There's no race here. There's no imagine if. We already have historical data. We already have results on hand
Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.
Sorry is the idea here that we’d cover the Sahara in PVs? The Sahara desert, in Africa, the most dysfunctional continent on the planet. And, what, we’d lay a billion miles of transmission lines? You can’t keep reliable electricity running in those countries today because of how frequent copper theft is. You think building a solar farm is going to work?
This is the problem with PV boosters. It’s just fantasy about a supranational government doing mega projects, when in reality you can just build reactors today for an order of magnitude less in complexity and real estate. “Would I live next to a reactor” of course I would, because if I had that option my electricity would be free. Asking me if I’d want to live next to a uranium mine, well would you live next to a lithium mine? Disingenuous environmental activists have been using this bullshit argument for 30 years now, it doesn’t work on me.
Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past.
Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.