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Comment by usrnm | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad somebody is doing it, even if it's Meta. The world really needs more energy and nuclear is a great option

As technology improves, we have less and less need for nuclear. The continent with the greatest need for nuclear is Europe, and these German grid modelers have taken a look at the EU grid with the latest data and decided that additional baseload generation (like nuclear) is not required and will likely increase costs if built:

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...

Germany took it's last three nuclear reactors offline in 2023 and now the primary source of their electrical generation is coal.

See https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

That is factually incorrect. The primary source is wind at 132 TWh in 2025, followed by solar with 70 TWh.

Lignite was third with 67 TWh and hard coal sits at 27 TWh.

https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...

Lignite is coal, so that'd make coal #2

Official source for 2025 Q3: 64,1% renewable 20,6% coal 12% gas

https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...

Your claim about current electrical generation is incorrect and obviously not supported by your source, which shows data from 2021.

In addition to the other corrections here, I'd like to add one more remarkable fact: in 2025 the share of German electricity generated by solar increased to 18% from 14%. That's in a single year, in a country with terribly low levels of sun! Nuclear generated 5% of electricity before it was shut down, and had generated that same percentage for more than a decade (that's as far back as the chart I saw went).

It's remarkably easy to scale solar to very large amounts in short time periods. Far easier than building a new nuclear fleet.

Is it though? Do we need more ads and more social media company AI?

hell yeah!

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