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Comment by teiferer | Hacker News Reader

Using German coal dependence as a baseline statistic to prove that nuclear is more economical than green energy is a remarkable stunt.

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What's the stunt? France built reactors for modest cost and phased out coal.

Germany wasted enormous amounts of money on green energy and made very little progress.

Which country is more "green"? Which technology is more "green"?

I'd say you are comparing different things in different eras. When France built the majority of its nuclear plants, 70s-90s, Germany didn't do anything renewable to speak of but sunk billions into the dying coal industry. Unions and other worker movements put lots of pressure on policy makers to keep subsidizing coal long after it was remotely meaningful to do so, mainly to avoid coal workers getting unemployed and whole regions dying out. Would have been cheaper to just give all those workers a sizeable pension and kick-start other tech, nuclear or not.

When Germany started serious bets on wind and solar, after 2000, France didn't really add much nuclear anymore.

So, the comparison you are making just doesn't work well, no matter if one likes nuclear or not.

Well if France could build reactors in the 70s-90s, then Germany could have done it in 2000s, right? It's not an alien technology.

Instead they chose to pour money into wind and solar and ended up with:

* higher CO2 emissions

* higher consumer electricity prices

* all that for much higher implementation cost

The gap is massive. I think it's directly comparable: these are two neighboring EU countries, comparable in size, population and GDP. They made different choices which led to significantly different outcomes.

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