I'm not really opposed to nuclear power politically. I just think it's a non-starter given the much higher cost, complexity of buildout and lack of reliability.
Iceland is a small area, small population outlier literally sitting on two plates rubbing up against each other and a relative excess of active volcanism and large lava fields.
About 85 percent of the total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources. Use of abundant hydroelectric and geothermal power has made Iceland the world's largest electricity producer per capita.
Countries like UK, Ireland, Germany, Danmark, Netherland, Poland also have dark winters. Solar in winter is only about a fifth of production in summer months.
Iceland has geothermal, which is amazing, but won't help central Europe.
Those places also have a huge wind resource in the form of the North Sea, for Ireland whatever the other bits of that submerged continental shelf are called, and for Poland the Baltic: https://globalwindatlas.info/en/
This is important because wind season anti-correlates with PV season.
Yet there are whole weeks practically without wind in winter. And most climate models estimate that global warming reduces wind further. Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.
> Yet there are whole weeks practically without wind in winter. And most climate models estimate that global warming reduces wind further.
Not for the combination of [continent-wide, offshore, the Atlantic coast].
The Atlantic continental shelf isn't correlated with the Baltic.
Offshore Dunkelflaute is much shorter than on-shore.
> Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.
Also false. The required quantities even of batteries is comparable to electrification of road transport.
Also, independently of batteries, hydro plants come in two flavours that people often mix up: generation, and storage. Of these, only generation requires an associated upstream supply and watershed; storage can be done with a hole in the ground, of which there are plenty, and just the currently and soon-to-be closed coal mines in the EU can be converted to around 13 TWh of pumped storage: https://gfzpublic.gfz.de/rest/items/item_5038282_1/component...
And it's not like we can't dig more holes if we wanted to, we dig holes to get out rocks even though rocks are one of the cheapest things you can buy.
Storage of energy in the dimensions required for weeks with almost no wind is an unsolved problem. Right now, we can't store enough to make it through a single night without using fossil fuels. Most countries don't even have the capacity to store the energy for a single hour.
As we can store fossil fuels for weeks of demand, we can store the required energy in chemical form, no? Germany has huge natural gas storage, for ezample.
Geothermal and storage is worth investing in, investing in nuclear is not. NPPs are simply too expensive and you won't find investors unless you heavily subsidize it with tax money. Only compnies willing to invest in NPPs are those with virtually free money: the handful of AI big tech giants.
We're building the factories to make them as fast as we can find investors with money to spend on them, because they're already cheaper than fossil fuels which are themselves cheaper than nuclear.
