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Comment by BenoitP | Hacker News Reader

If Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would not be wasting currently 5GW of gas for electricity (and burning much less lignite coal as well):

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

> one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia

It is a common false perception that it is a problem, very often pushed by fake news outlets. You might be a victim. Russia produces about 15% of the world's uranium [1], according to UNECE.

[1] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...

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The EU publishes official numbers on where they get their uranium from, there is no need to make guesstimates, Russian uranium accounts for 20%. And this ignores that Russia has the largest uranium processing capabilities in the world, so dependency on Russia is higher than the imports of natural uranium suggest.

Lastly, nuclear power plants produce a constant base load while the coal and gas power plants have a very dynamic output and it's simply misleading to pretend that a GW of nuclear energy can replace a GW of coal or gas without taking all of the production into account.

Which makes them one of the largest exporters of uranium in the world, including to the EU, which is what I've said. A victim of what exactly? Knowing the facts?

Imagine the importance of Russian uranium if there was a nuclear renaissance and the world suddenly built terawatts of nuclear plants, which is what this article is proposing and presumably you too. And also, Russians are one of the last countries that actually builds them including abroad, so a nuclear surge would mean countries lining up to have Russian nuclear plants built.

The article is devoid of not only data, but common sense.

If Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would be burning about as much fossil fuels as it does now.

That's because without the opposition to nuclear, the motivating reason to build up renewables would have been gone, so it wouldn't have happen. Which means Germany would have continued with about 10 % (of primary energy) nuclear and the rest would have been fossil fuels.

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