Switzerland, Norway and Austria are probably the country that needs nuclear the less, but anything to start the discussion in other European countries is good.
Probably not economically viable in Switzerland though.
Probably not economically viable in Switzerland though.
50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission.
Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise.
To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potential losses of hydro power as glaciers melt, nuclear + solar is the only real path for switzerland.
I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.
I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.
I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.
I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....
I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.
Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale
We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)
As such, as of now, the EU can shut down Switzerland without warning if the grid is overloaded and they need to avoid a blackout.
The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).
Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.
All year? And do you mean you "inject" more than you "pull", or do you mean that you can live without ever pulling anything from the grid?
Because "being a net producer overall" doesn't say that it would work in practice if everyone was doing the same, right?
I have a 40kWp system and a 20kWh battery.
We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.
Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?
Nuclear's probably still more expensive than that.
I'm not saying we give up on nuclear entirely. It should be at the well-funded research and prototyping phase for another 10 years.
In my opinion, at least for consumer energy, I think perovskite solar cells and sodium ion batteries for home storage will enable a very large oversupply or overcapacity start evening out the intermittent fears.
But admittedly I haven't not done the exact math
Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s
I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.
https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...
The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.
People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.
My clean dinner table is completely artificial, but that doesnt mean I should be neutral to someone placing a bowl of shit on it.
The balance being: do you build a ton of those turbines, or one nuclear plant?
The problem is actually that people don't have enough attention to actually read about it. People are stuck in "I am a smart adult, I don't have to think, whatever I believe is right".
Those are actual problems and wind turbines actually deploy mitigations for them. Possible for birds, not for bats. Many endangered bats are killed as a result.
Sure, as compared to not giving a shit about the living condition of, say, billions of chickens, it may sound like it doesn't matter. But not everybody wants to live on a lifeless planet surrounded by the worst species ever (I mean humans).
> It's almost as bad as the "wind turbines cause cancer" BS.
If you genuinely believe it is, then you vastly overestimate your common sense.
The bats and birds is an issue that the oil and gas industry regularly pushes because it sounds concerning, but really isn't.
Are you aware that wind turbines have detection systems for bird migrations and stop to avoid killing too many birds? If it was not an "actual problem", why would they spend money in actual solutions?
Are you aware of the context of this bat killing "problem"? it is almost entirely a problem for older, unregulated wind farms in Germany. The "problem" has a simple solution, which has been proven to work - stopping wind turbines when bats are known to be moving, for a total of about twenty minutes per day.
It's not a real problem. If it were actually a problem you should be able to walk under a wind turbine and find a bunch of dead birds/bats. The reality is you might find 1 or 2, but not enough to actually observe any sort of impact on the population. Outdoor cats are a far bigger menace to birds and bats.
So yeah, you build a ton of those turbines. Because by the time you can deploy 1 1GW plant (10 to 20 years) you can install 10 or 20 times that much power generation via wind. By the time the nuclear plant is operational, you can be talking about refurbishing some of the early installed turbines.
A nuclear plant requires fuel sourcing, waste management, engineering and planning, constant management and monitoring, security, and a fairly large construction footprint for the likes of the cooling towers.
Wind requires someone to go grease the gears once a year.
That's not how it works, but thanks for not thinking about it for more than a few seconds. It is documented, you can read about that. In Germany, tens of thousands of bats are killed by wind turbines every year. For birds, they do have camera systems that detect bird migrations and stop the turbines.
So yeah, it is very much a real problem, you just have to read about it.
> Wind requires someone to go grease the gears once a year.
So it's not only the birds problem: you don't know how wind turbines are maintained either!
I can understand people objecting to plastering the south facing unshaded Alps with panels, but .. it would certainly generate a lot.
Still much better than gas though…
Solar panels on each square cm of roofs together with agrovoltaics and solar on every farm and a few more of those 2TWh hydro storage plants we have, and we are energy independent and can service a large part of our infrastructure ourselves.
Solar requires more materials per kwh even compared to nuclear. But even if it didn't - since hydro potential isn't sufficient - gas is required for firming. This was also mentioned by axpo
Solar doesn’t require more materials per kWh. LCOE of solar is order of magnitude lower than Nuclear.
And we do have more mountains that we can build out.
In fact, if the AMOC weakens/stops then there will be a drastic drop in precipitation across Europe and funnily enough maybe the temperature drop so much that the little snow there will be won't melt in big enough quantities.
Of course this is just a ban lift, meaning that there are no concrete plans to build one or more, but if there is a need to move "fast" (nuclear is not, I know) at least there is one less hurdle. I sincerily hope we invest in other technologies, especially now that Sodium batteries seem on their way to solve grid level storage, but I don't necessarily see this as a bad move per se.
Edit: Not Norway - Doh!
- We have a lot of hydro, that are very cheap to produces and for some of the power plants we fill up water by using solar and wind when that is very cheap and generate power back when it's demand for it (meaning selling it expensive)
-Norway export more then we are importing. But that could shift in the coming years.
-Nuclear power are expensive, so with the current prices it do not make sense to have nuclear in Norway. Thought that could change (see point 2)
- not sure what you mean by "little land usable", you can absolutely be correct. in terms of size we are bigger then Germany. But I'm not sure how much usable land there is vs other countries. We do not have that big population but it's spread out and no one wants a wind park in their neighborhood
Obviously Norway has massive amounts of offshore wind potential too
It's probably too expensive, because the best way to make nuclear cheap is to build it 'at scale', and here I mean, continuously. You need a company that will get a reactor out of the ground every year or so, continuously, to avoid loosing knowledge and build upon failures or success.
I know three persons who work or used to work directly with nuke plants, one my age who is currently working in getting the newest french reactors off the ground, and two who are friends of my father, one who finished his career in China, and the other became a submarine welder. From the discussion I've listened to, and especially from the welder, the technical requirements are very high, knowledge and techniques have been lost and making nuke plants correctly nowadays on the first try would be a miracle (he is also very skeptical of the first wave of french reactors), you need to iterate and build knowledge, which isn't cheap.
France is not "struggling", they are once again the #1 electricity exporter in Europe, with low-electricity prices, reliable supply, huge profits, and world-beating CO₂ emissions.
Their newest energy roadmap has drastically reduced renewables build-out, while at the same including first 6 and then 8 new EPR2 reactors.