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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

France has legacy nuclear plants because of history and inertia. If they were forced to start from scratch today it wouldn't make sense to build nuclear plants, they're not competitive (and France can't build them effectively now.) Flamanville 3 was a fiasco.

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I wonder why not. Maybe red tape has multiplied to the extent that nothing interesting can be built these days? I used to have a flat in France what was powered by a small amount of nuclear generated electricity - it had good insulation too. It seemed a practical co2 free solution providing good quality of life decades ago.

We aren't building a lot of stuff these days, so maybe it's just that we've lost the scale needed to support the skills to do construction well. Back then populations were growing rapidly; there was also rebuilding after WW2. GDP growth in France during that time was maybe 5%/year. Today? Almost flat.

Today, that massive construction is occurring in China, at least for the moment. But even China is installing renewables and storage at a much larger rate than they are building nuclear plants.

Today, Europe is not even manufacturing solar cells for installations in Europe.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

https://statranker.org/economy/top-10-countries-leading-sola...

https://www.sunsave.energy/solar-panels-advice/solar-energy/...

https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains

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