If only the rest of the world would also adopt this mentality; Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
This is false. New nuclear is much more expensive than renewables in most cases. It's possible there are places in the world where renewables are particularly expensive and new nuclear could approach being competitive now, but even that will not last as renewables continue down their inexorable experience curves -- experience curves that nuclear has failed to exhibit.
Correct with that caveat.
China is able to build it cheaply enough that it rivals solar/wind + gas, which is what the West is doing. (Solar/wind + battery is cute, but it's been crowded out by the quicker-deploying gas infrastructure, as well as the higher prices EV manufacturers are willing to pay for supply. The threat to gas was nuclear baseload, which could support a smaller battery footprint, but the gas lobbyists seem to have successfully dispatched it.)
I suspect the only reason China is continuing to build NPPs is inertia, and a desire to not amputate that part of their industrial sector. The grandiose plans have been scaled way back. But that can continue for only so long before it's written off.
But there’s nothing wrong with all that. China conducted a natural experiment with multiple technologies and renewables and storage appear to have won big. The important thing is that those of us outside of China can learn the lessons without having to repeat the experiment.
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US...
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(The Henry Hub natural gas price on 6/11/2024 was $2.71/MMBtu, or $2.17/MMBtu in Dec. 2018 dollars.)
Interest in the US "nuclear renaissance" evaporated once it became clear fracking would make natural gas cheap for the foreseeable future. What's interesting about renewables in the US is they are plowing ahead with large deployments even in the face of cheap natural gas.
As you can see the data does not support this claim of yours. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
There was a dip due to COVID, and it doesn't help matters that their biggest customer is China, which locked down their population for nearly a year during the pandemic.
Sure, China makes widgets, but Germany makes the robots that make the widgets.
So the graph is a bit misleading in that various qualities of energy are lumped together.
New Nuclear won't matter. Keeping existing running is a no brainer.
In the West. China can build out nuclear power plants quicker than we can lay HVDC.
The answer for nuclear (if there is one) is factory built SMRs. Those exist in the experimental phases. If SMRs take off, the current designs aren’t going to matter. If SMRs don’t take off, nuclear itself probably isn’t going to matter.
Three years planned for permitting [1], and that's before any ground is broken.
[1] https://www.permits.performance.gov/permitting-project/fast-...
This bullshit narrative needs to die. Germany is less dependent on fossil fuels than it has ever been before, and weathered the withdrawal from Russian sources without any serious problems.
(And here's where you move the goalposts to "it could be even less less dependent!!")
In 2020, the last coal power plant was connected to the grid (Datteln 4). It was delayed, as it wasn't clear for quite a while whether it was even legal. But the decisions that have been made to build these plants were made 15-20 years ago.
They are now back to the level of 2021.
> and manufacturers moved to lower-cost countries.
Some loudly talked about it in hopes of pulling in some subsidies and that got vastly overreported for propaganda reasons.