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I wish Italy did the same.

We still have to deal with the consequences of a referendum hold not so long after che Chernobyl accident which made it illegal to build and operate nuclear power plants.

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It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries. You even have the industrial prowess to make it all in the country step by step, whereas nuclear reactors are such humongous engineering projects that building the capacity is very out of reach.

Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how are you going to cool down your reactors? Nuclear in Italy is a non-starter.

> It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries

Do you have any trustable source for this?

Latitude?

This is relevant for solar irradiance but tells nothing about storage capacity.

Just look at any map of solar power potential, solar irradiance, hours of sunshine of Europe.

I think the question is more about the "and batteries" part than about the sunshine part.

Exactly

I'd say "Supplementary Information for Strategic deployment of solar photovoltaics for achieving self-sufficiency in Europe throughout the energy transition"[1] fits the bill. It lays out various paths to 100% renewables (which in Italy, like in Spain, is heavily solar) by 20250

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61492-9.pdf

Solar, wind, and even hydroelectricity are too dependent upon the environment to make up the entire electricity generation capacity of any major industrial country. With renewables, even with batteries, the actual production is within a range. Couple that with demand also being in a range you get uncomfortable possibilities at play. And while colder water is definitely preferable for cooling, I'd have to imagine that if the bodies of water were actually becoming too hot to cool a nuclear reactor system there'd be bigger problems than energy production.

The limit is not how cold the water needs to be for the power plant, but how hot it can be for the river ecology to not take (too much) damage. Even in Germany power plants regularly need to be shut down.

> 2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to shut down their nuclear power plants partly or fully because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm (Barber, 2022; Limb, 2022; Miller and Vladkov, 2022). Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature (European Parliament and European Council, 2000; IKSR, 2022b). The resulting unplanned outages — and the efforts by nuclear operators to avoid such disruptions — highlight pressing concerns about the sustainability of nuclear energy, particularly its impact on river ecosystems in an increasingly warming world (see Fig. 1).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...

It was mostly for units without cooling towers. Nowadays inland units have them included

Why not both?

We still need rotating mass to keep the grid stable, which means either building giant flywheels, keep burning gas or bring nuclear into the mix.

One of these can also produce a ton of energy when needed, the other two cant.

We can and should build more renewables, but we can't risk grid stability!

We actually don’t need those anymore. Grid forming inverters and batteries will take over that role.

It's technically possible to replace rotating mass with batteries using a "grid-forming inverter", which is an inverter that converts the battery DC to AC with frequency varying depending on the grid load, simulating how that rotating mass would behave ("synthetic inertia"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource#Grid-f...

This competes with the traditional giant flywheel option ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser ), which has the advantage of being a simple and proven technology, and handling brief overload better, but the disadvantage of having moving parts. It's not clear which option is currently best. Both are in current use.

And as a third answer: You actually don't need to take the flywheels of the power plants offline, when you take the rest of the power plant down. The locations for them are perfect, as the whole grid has historically been build around them.

Italy has much less hydro vs Spain, no access to cheap gas and no cheap nuclear. Building nuclear in parallel with ren is a must.

Cooling is never a problem. You design the plants properly, see Palo Verde. But for Italy cooling towers are enough

> I wish Italy did the same.

They are in the process. Last I checked the bill to do so had passed the lower house and how needs to get ratified by the senate.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/italian-bill-on-...

Amazing. Let's cross fingers!

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