Do the “no nuclear, renewables are the future” people have any comments?
We burned a few decades saying solar and wind are the solution. This set us back greatly in the struggle to reduce greenhouse emissions.
We burned a few decades saying solar and wind are the solution. This set us back greatly in the struggle to reduce greenhouse emissions.
As an system-oriented person, give me a healthy combination of available, battle tested, new and promising solutions, fine-tuning weaknesses with strengths.
Go to the stadium to solve your local team/visiting team issues. You are all falling to Big Fossil antics.
How many nuclear electricity states are there? 30
How many nuclear weapons states are there? 9
What headaches are those nine nuclear capable states providing, exactly?
How has the world been made worse by having nine nuclear capable states? Practically, not just hypothetical anxieties about an unrealised future.
Preventing nuclear war is just 'hypothetical anxieties'? We should wait for a war to happen and then do something? That's not persuasive.
Roof top solar is great for people with spare cash to optimise heir future cash flow.
I advocate for nuclear because it guarantees the poor won’t freeze in the dark.
If it's monetary gain then thats a political not one in residence.
If not producing enough power then that's a people's problem. Being greedy taking more than what they need and for not enough resources on building efficiency.
Overall solar works. It's just gate-kept tightly by evil organisations who are scared to lose their dirty cash for such technology to evolve.
And why would a landlord sink $10,000+ in to a property for no return.
Roof top solar only works for the user who has the roof top solar.
For everyone else it makes electricity more expensive.
Happy to be proven wrong. Show me a majority of places with high roof top solar penetration where per kWh electricity rates have fallen.
And who cares about carbon emissions, China and India have that covered - I don’t need to worry about producing more or less CO2 emissions because it won’t make any difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic climate change.
> And who cares about carbon emissions, China and India have that covered - I don’t need to worry about producing more or less CO2 emissions because it won’t make any difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic climate change.
That doesn't change the US's contribution, the ability of the US to form successful international agreements, and the influence of the US pulling its weight as a much wealthier country than China or India.
Blaming your neighbor for your bad behavior - I sell drugs off my porch because my neighbor does - doesn't make you less criminal. Also unacceptable, from moral and practical perspectives, is saying 'there's nothing I can do'. It's time we stop letting that pass.
So it doesn't go on the roof.
Doesn't mean you can't get PV, in an apartment, as a renter:
https://www.kaufland.de/product/502008893/
These are specifically intended for apartments, and Germany has a low home ownership rate.
It may only be 800W, but it's also only €239, not $10,000 like you suggest in the other reply.
As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If it wasn't for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 122 and 284 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
An extra 50 years to solve the problem changes everything.
Yes, but that's not what's concerning the skeptics anymore, especially for solar (thankfully - the cost reductions and efficiency gains have been great). Aside from the well known geographical variance, I think the biggest legitimate concern is intermittence.
Let me try to turn that into a decent question: What variable other than energy output is most useful in order to compare energy sources? For context, all I've seen when it comes to intermittence is flame war with weak arguments thrown from both sides of the debate, i.e. "intermittence is not a problem at all, we just need batteries" to "intermittent sources are worth a fraction of an equivalent baseload source".
Honestly, I've not been convinced of either side, and (if I'm not alone in that sentiment), it may be a problem of education and communication.
We threw absolutely massive handouts at the nuclear industry 20 years ago.
Only look to Vogtle, Virgin C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3 and all other projects. Moorside, Oldbury, Wylfa and countless in the US.
Had new built nuclear power delivered on budget and on time nuclear power would definitely have been part of the solution.
Instead Vogtle provides electricity costing 19 cents/kWh. Virgil C. Summer is a $10B hole in the ground and Flamanville 3, which is not finished yet, is 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
The true underdog from that time, renewables (and storage) deliver energy cheaper than even fossil fuels.
Today they are wholly unable to build new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
Their EPR2 program is also in absolute shambles continually being pushed into the future while revising up the costs.
Now hopefully targeting investment decision in mid 2026 and the first new reactor online by 2038.
Until 2038 we should of course stop decarbonizing. No point reducing the area under the curve.
It was impressive, but it's been overshadowed by modern renewables.
In France about 60% of final energy is produced thanks to fossil fuel.
Moreover the cost of this 'nuclearization' was huge (France debt is abyssal, and taxes are very high)
Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
What set us back was and is resistance to action on climate change, led by fossil fuel corporations and US conservatives, which has continued for decades. It's a fundamental policy of the Republican Party. Trump is already taking drastic action in that regard; it was one of his higher priorities. To try to blame someone else is absurd, and probably a talking point from their playbook.
Don't try to position yourself as the majority voice. Nuclear energy is all but clean and I don't understand the odd push in the last few years to go all in on nuclear even though there was a common understanding that it should not be the future.
Today solar & wind are the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushes nuclear as a distraction.
The problem is that new built nuclear power costs tens of billions.
From a single web search just now:
- 400MW of solar in Illinois and Texas, Feb 10 2025 Reuters https://archive.is/5x9VA - 20MW of Wisconsin solar, October 2024 https://nationalgridrenewables.com/press-release/national-gr... - 400MW of Texas solar, Apr 8 2024 https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/04/08/microsoft-signs-two-l...
and that's just the first three hits, there are so many more. TMI won't come online for years, it's planned for 2028, but we will have to see. It was shut down in 2019 because it couldn't compete with gas prices. Microsoft is buying at inflated prices to subsidize clean energy, but solar is also clean energy and when backed by batteries it is price competitive with gas.
The news was because "whoa Microsoft is paying for nuclear" not because "whoa nuclear makes a lot of sense."
There's only so many uneconomic nuclear reactors to start back up.
On the other side: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/micros...
This is a solved problem. The investment required to build grid storage for renewables, the TCO, the scalability, the capacity, and the build time, are all objectively better than nuclear.
So what's the real story? What is this obsession with an outdated last-century technology really about?
Which was followed by climate change denying conservatives who found their position untenable embracing nuclear power being able to create a culture war issue in debates about climate change.
All in the name of preventing the disruption of their fossil assets by stymying renewables.
Peter Dutton in Australia which now lost is the perfect example of this with his ”coal to nuclear” plan leading to massively increased emissions for decades to come.
- Renewables are not, or not nearly as much, big profits for big business. They don't require the capital investment of fossil fuels or nuclear, and therefore they don't have the large moats of those businesses.
- Anti-liberalism (or reactionaryism): Destroying liberalism is an openly stated goal for which many will sacrifice singificant wealth and cause significant harm. Nuclear is counter to anti-nuclear liberal campaigners of yesteryear (I think conservatives often have little idea of changes since the Cold War era; they still talk about 'Communists', etc.)
People overlook how long nuclear takes to build. Hinkley Point C is approaching a decade.
In 2024 we, as in globally, completed about 5 GW of new built nuclear.
Let’s compare to renewables:
- 600 GW solar PV added [1]
- 117 GW wind power [2]
- ~100 GW battery storage
Even when adjusting for TWh the disparity is absolutely enormous. We’re talking a ~50x differences and it is only getting larger as renewables continue to scale.
But somehow the only technology which is ”scalable” is new built nuclear power.
[1]: https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-w...
[2]: https://www.gwec.net/gwec-news/wind-industry-installs-record...
The histories of pretty much every green party in the western world and their anti-nuclear activism suggests otherwise.
Greenpeace spent years campaigning against dumping waste at sea.
In a reasonably free market, which doesn't exist for electricity, solar would win handily.. but this is after decades of subsidized development and incremental improvement by Chinese wafer factories.
Why do you think that is? Somehow I'm not convinced its the activism holding nuclear back.
E.g. for Germany - the most high profile nuclear exits: - nuclear and fossile energy producers were the exact same companies - why would they fund activists to campaign against their own assets? - coal mining and plant employees were (around the first exit) part of a significant worker voter population, especially for the social democrats but to a lesser degree for the conservatives, too. The largest state was heavily dependent on the coal industry and SPD/CDU politicians regularly moved to/from leadership positions in coal-dependent energy producers. No party except possibly the Greens would have remotely touched a coal exit and discussions around that only seriously started after the second (conservative reversal reversal) nuclear exit. - gas and nuclear fuel in major quantities came from Russia, from different Russian state companies - why would they cut into each other's business by funding activists? They were happy for Germany to depend on them in any and all ways. - the second nuclear exit was a political play for voter sentiment by conservatives after Fukushima - they didn't even try to explain why nuclear should be kept for all the reasons they reversed the previous exit and still killed of the nascent booming solar/wind industry - they certainly were not renewables activists. Just recently the reverse happened as part of conservatives pre-election promises to rebuild nuclear as a play for voter sentiment due to temporarily high (war-dependent, already normalized) energy prices. It wasn't important enough for them to include in the government coalition plans in any way whatsoever - the main conservative agitator for nuclear has now had to agree that nuclear is economically dead.
The reality is that nuclear in Germany was already dead when the first exit was voted on - nobody had built plants in a long time, nobody had any plans to build them. If not for the exit plans to start a renewables transition, fossil usage would be far higher today and because of the exit reversal and delay in coal exit due to the conservatives it is much higher today than it needed to be and we're much more dependent on Chinese manufacturers, too.
At most activists were somewhat involved in voter sentiment at some points, but it wasn't particularly crucial versus the actual economic and political realities.
The reason is, I think, that the progressives have rationally better policies - ones that become mainstream decades later, including much of what is mainstream now - so by demonizing the progressives the center and right prevent people from actually considering the policies.
More recently progressive prosecutors have been tried and the results are pretty clear they lead to increased crime.
Consider perhaps the progressive policies have been considered and rejected for good reasons.
Crime increases were across the country, regardless of the politics of the prosecutor. They are believed to be tied to the pandemic. In places where progressive DAs remain, crime has subsequently decreased to historic lows - just like the rest of the country.
Second, this one study says only that property crimes seemed to increase 7% and that there is no other increase, including violent crimes.
Third, it omits the massive benefits of progressive prosecutors, including following the law (and not persecuting disliked people or groups; not manipulating trials with false evidence, etc.; making police and other goverment accountable), actual justice, and reducing jail and prison populations - which saves tax dollars and save enormous damage to communities as people who now can't get jobs become unproductive and as their families are left destitute.
That doesn't match the anti-progressive propaganda, which we should know by now is motivated not by truth or concern for the public, but self-centered political gain.
He said no nuclear power plant was ever profitable
When you say nuclear was never cheap, what are you comparing it to? The impossible to compete with subsidization of coal plants? How can you compete with plants that are allowed to dump toxic radioactive waste into the atmosphere that kills hundreds of thousands annually, but your plants have to go through regulatory hell to prove they're 99.99999999% safe before even being approved?