Would have been a great opportunity to make money then by exporting their own nuclear power... if they hadn't shut a bunch of it down.
Then they could have chosen to refund their own consumers, if that's what they wanted.
Then they could have chosen to refund their own consumers, if that's what they wanted.
China is happy to fill in the void.
I mean granted, China's push to expand their solar panel production has led to affordable solar panels for a lot of home owners and communities, massively boosting solar / renewable energy adoption to the point that local energy grids are at capacity. Likewise, their push to expand production of batteries and cars has led to an influx of more affordable cars into Europe.
But isn't that the wish / goal? More renewable energy, less dependence on petrol and gas and the like? It's just that both the US and Europe didn't invest and scale up as much and as fast as China was able to.
China is investing in power generation almost as much as the rest of the world combined. That energy is used by their massive and growing manufacturing industry. Bye bye EU manufacturing like cars.
Note China wasn't even a significant exporter of cars just 10 years ago and now they are becoming dominant.
Germany and the EU dug their grave. It would be hard to undo the damage now.
Sustainability is just incompatible with capitalism
Energy, water, sewage treatment. Nationalize all of it.
Nuclear power is basically taking a loan (national security and trash which has to be stored at least thousands of years) with a huge risk (nuclear disaster like Chernobyl or worse).
It's France 9th biggest export.
Now imagine infinite uranium and everyone using nuclear power. Where would they export now?
This kind of misguided thinking has stopped us from utilizing nuclear power properly. It is a greatest stopgap we have before we find a way to store energy properly and can pivot to renewables.
CO2 isn't a problem of renewables.
In Germany, the problem with renewables is massively scaling green gas production. Storage exists plenty fairly cheap, even for hydrogen (Underground).
Renewables aren't available 24/7, as they work in cycles in most cases(sunlight, tides, waves, wind - geothermal and hydroelectric is an exception, but latter also has problems with damages to ecosystem, and handling sediment travel along the rivers) - this is the most basic problem with them. Grid demands electricity in a way that does not align with the renevable's production, so you need buffers.
So you need to build both energy storage, and energy generation - both are source of pollutants, and eRoI over the whole lifecycle isn't actually that impressive. It is a way to go though, but we are far off from fully transitioning to it.
if you genuinely have to ask that question, you need to read more about energy before you start discussing it. and especially about modern nuclear reactor designs, and how catastrophe in Chernobyl happened(forced orders from above, basically a human failure)
even low efficiency (e.g. hydrogen) is tolerable when renewables otherwise would go to waste
also the amount of storage you have to build also damages the ecosystem.
It's not even close in the same ballpark.
An not every materials production implies inherent co2 emissions.
the amount of storage build for spent nuclear fuel+energy buffer vs buffer for just renewables aren't even in same ballpark. Just do a simple fermi estimation. Btw - the white "smoke" coming out from cooling towers of nuclear power-plant are pure water vapor.
And that's not even going into MSFTs or other reactor types. just traditional ones.
Honestly, such blind faith is actually hurting renewables movement by giving climate change deniers more ammo to pummel the movement with.
I meant the amount of concrete needed (nuclear ppl vs energy storage)
> such blind faith is actually hurting renewables movement by giving climate change deniers more ammo to pummel the movement with.
what faith? renewable vs nuclear debate has nothing to do with the question of the existence of climate change