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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear power is pretty expensive and doesn't do well in a grid with a high percentage of renewables.

We've spent in excess of 900 euros per MWh this year on fossil sources to back up renewables this last year, Europe-wide, because there IS NO OPTION to sacrifice reliable power - if there is shortfall, society collapses, quickly. There is no even vaguely credible plan to replace those sources. At this point, the European "market" is so stuffed with subsidies out of wholly predictable "temporary necessity" the whole god-damn concept of a "market price" is a lie.

Germany chose coal and gas. They should be held accountable for that.

Nobody claims that we have sufficient renewables right now. If we had more, we would've needed to spend less on fossil fuels this year. You just postulate that fossil fuels can't be replaced. The experts disagree, there are multiple studies that lay out how to do it.

Expensive compared to what? It’s only expensive if you ignore the negative externalities of literally everything else.

Expensive compared to renewables of course.

Renewables + energy storage are more expensive than nuclear power plants.

no, they are not

Talk to people involved in the Fukushima cleanup about "externalities" some time.

Nuclear power is only cheap if you ignore that in essence, the whole society is carrying the risk of almost anything that goes wrong. A nuclear power company can't insure any of those risks and certainly can't pay the damages.

Also hidden in those cost estimates is that you need a highly specialized labor force that is hard to ramp up and ramp down, and the field isn't exactly trendy. France is having a huge issue with that right now.

Do you have a reference for the Fukushima cleanup talk? Any documents, interviews? France chose to switch off some reactors just because one had shown corrosion on a safety tube that is not used in normal operations, has about 0.1% chance of being needed, so all the plants with that tube were shut down just in case. The Chinese are running plants much closer to the metal, have had zero issues...

There are plenty of search engines. Learn to use one some time.

I'm quite worried about China in general. Their inability to regulate various sectors doesn't bode well for their future nuclear safety record. You also wouldn't know anything about Chinese nuclear incidents unless it's absolutely unignoreable.

Works really good for France and Sweden.

Then research some more about how "well" it works for France. Germany actually exported quite a lot of energy to France before the transition from nuclear.

France has plenty of problems with nuclear power. The only conclusion is that nuclear power for France only makes sense - barely - because France wants to have nuclear weapons.

You should be more specifix. France is the biggest electricuty exporter of the last decades. They also heat with electricity, not gas. Their Co2 emissions are a fraction of German emissions. What‘s so great about German electricity?

Then why is France massively reducing its reliance on nuclear over the coming two or three decades?

Citation needed

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