It ain't the money cost, we have money coming out our ears.
It's the time cost. Nuclear takes far too long; geothermal merely takes too long. Same with fancy long-distance HV transmission proposals.
Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.
It's the time cost. Nuclear takes far too long; geothermal merely takes too long. Same with fancy long-distance HV transmission proposals.
Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.
And yet nuclear is the only tech that has proven to decarbonize a major industrial economy within just a few decades. But of course it takes to long.
When in reality it has not been proven that anybody has ever used solar and wind to de-carbonize a major economy. But somehow everybody knows that it is 'fast'.
Germany could have literally gone to 100% nuclear within the last 20 years and it would likely have cost them 250 billion $ or less. Reliable energy for 100 years. Almost no cost for the grid because you can just build nuclear plants next to coal plants.
> Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.
What is this obsession with short term thinking? When you build major long term infrastructure like trains tunnels, you simply don't do it in a year.
If France could do something in the 70/80s, finishing nuclear reactors multiple reactors every year. Germany could have done the same and they would be done by now.
Ironically because the French were so blessed with so many reactors, they were one of the few nations that didn't use their reactors very well. The Germans were actually better at using their reactors.
The French since the 90s are just as anti-nuclear as everybody else and they have done everything to destroy the amazing fleet they have, and only now realize how incredibly fucking stupid that was. They even forced the utility to collect money from the nuclear fleet and invest in solar. And they forced the utility to sell of nuclear base load at bargain bin prices and then force them to buy that power back at high prices.
And its amazing how anti-nuclear people can look down on France when literally every day they produce green cheap energy for all their people. And they have been saving CO2 for 40+ years, and that is worth more then any CO2 we are saving now.
Almost every other country should envy the French position.
Nuclear is providing cheap long term stable power supply and if they stop forcing their nuclear fleet to support solar and fossil (literally things the French government forced them to do) and do proper maintenance French will have cheap carbon free energy for the next 50+ years.
Funny how nuclear is so expensive and yet somehow people in France and places that nuclear reactors have mostly cheap power while Germany is spending absurd money prevent their population from feeling an even worse hurt from the policy they have inflicted on them.
In total the Germany population over the 50 years has paid way more for energy and getting way worse outcomes. That's a simple fact.
Just the cost for the measure Germany has to take now to buffer from this whole Russia fuckup would have been enough to pay for a whole fleet of nuclear reactors for Germany. Instead they are gone spend another 15+ years using coal and gas and then have to manage an incredibly unstable complex grid while having to replace all those wind plants they put up in the next 20-30 years.
And the French reactors will still be running and still provide stable carbon free power for a low price.
"It can be cheap! All you need is free loans, a liability cap less than the cost of one reactor, money from the military, exemption from any democratic process as to where they go, underfunding decomissioning, cheaping out on materials, never doing maintenance, charging more than the claimed cost, operating at a massive loss, creating a debt you foist on the public, build up billions of unpaid maintenance costs, and then not selling it for cheap! Oh, and you still need to overprovision and build backup."
Also it didn't decarbonize france's economy. It partially decarbonized its electricity, this is well under half of the goal. Numerous countries have achieved more with wind and hydro, and the list of countries with higher VRE percent than france's nuclear is growing longer by the month.
Literally no country uses renwales to produce transport fuel.
France decarbonized electricity and has a very high rate of electricity heating in homes. So they are ahead there to and they did that on the back of the nuclear fleet.
> Numerous countries have achieved more with wind and hydro
And even more country have achieved more with hydro and nuclear, such as Sweden or Switzerland.
So didn't decarbonize its economy then. And sweden prodices about as much wind as nuclear.
But the race is, at base, to displace atmospheric carbon release. So displacing more, faster is the measure of merit.