Solar panels decrease in efficiency when hot, but it's not like a complete shutdown.
When your solar panels are hot is noon in the summertime which is when you have way more solar power than you need anyway. Most grids that have substantial solar power are getting saturated with solar power at that time and running everything else at minimum capacity.
>we cannot build them anywere in Europe due to plain stupidity.
Economics I think. Nuclear power has gone bankrupt in France already (arguably more than once) and gotten bailed out. Now they produce electricity at a price that's often above market price, with losses covered by the taxpayers.
This despite relying on cheap cooling from rivers. Adding more expensive cooling won't help.
We've quite recently reached mass production economies of scale for both solar panels and batteries. The implications are that the price of electricity is set to drop even more in the years to come.
The bad financial shape of EDF had multiple reasons:
1. Cost overruns in construction of the new EPR reactors. The EPR is a extremely safe and as a result extremely overengineered and expensive design. The aim was to merge the French N4 design and German Konvoi design and have a standard design which would satisfy nuclear regulators in all countries. France wants now to simplify EPR and build cheaper and simpler EPR2.
2. EDF was mandated to sell large part of it's electricity production at bellow the market value. The ARENH mechanism.
"The ARENH (which in French means “regulated access to historic nuclear energy”) was created in 2011 in the context of the opening of the electricity market to competition. The law that provided a framework for this opening-up had the main objective of enabling all consumers to benefit from the competitiveness of the French nuclear fleet. Before the ARENH, EDF was the main electricity supplier, covering 95% of the French territory (the rest being covered by local distribution companies). Under the ARENH, so-called alternative suppliers (i.e. other than EDF) obtained access to a regulated price (€42/MWh) for the electricity produced by EDF’s historic nuclear fleet within a volume limit of 100 TWh per year. This is equivalent to almost a third (27.64%) of 2024 French nuclear production (361.7 TWh)."
At this point in time it can be assumed that 90% of everything on the internet is a lie.
French nuclear electricity is cheap because the government subsidizes it to keep it afloat. And because continental European electricity is generally expensive. It probably wouldn't survive in a free market.
I believe this is why the USA recently declared that it's no longer going to follow the "linear no-threshold model" and "as low as reasonable achievable" principle of radiation exposure. In other words they're declaring that a small amount of radiation is good for you. Building a reactor without shielding and with a single open-cycle water loop should reduce costs, right?
(Do you know what else reduces costs? Apparently, putting a foot of graphite at the bottom of your control rods and not paying close attention to a dangerously unstable reactor during an unusual experiment. These aren't official American policy yet.)
Also, the USA's recent ban on solar electricity equipment should help make other forms more competitive.
Linear no-threshold and ALARA are pretty objectively overly conservative, to the point of potentially doing more harm than good (Fukushima is mentioned down below. More people died as a result of the evacuation than would have resulted from the radiation) as well as making many things obscenely expensive. It's a little absurd that nuclear plants obsess over radiation doses smaller than a short-haul flight.
Linear no-threshold being false doesn't necessarily mean a little bit of radiation is good for you, though there is some shaky data to suggest that might be true, just that small amounts of radiation are not as proportionally bad as large amounts.
Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.
Meanwhile the nuclear industry has been drowning for 50+ years from egregious layers of overregulation.
It costed NuScale $500+ Million just to write the documents required for regulatory approval for a new reactor design.
Microsoft is spending $60 Million a year to build an LLM whose only purpose is to automate writing nuclear regulatory documents.
I don't support the Trump admin one iota, but I'm also saddened that democrats tend to be too safetyist to do an honest cost benefit evaluation of some of these insane regulations.
>Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.
You say these two things as if the second statement supports the first, but it doesn't.
The dangers of radiation are very well known and don't change at all based on what happened at Fukushima. If you fire a gun and miss, the gun is still dangerous.
>Meanwhile the nuclear industry has been drowning for 50+ years from egregious layers of overregulation.
Here's an account of two gruesome deaths caused by poor regulation of nuclear materials in Japan. It happened 12 years before Fukushima.
> Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.