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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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1041 points mpweiher | 5 comments | 12 Sep 25 18:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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jama211 ◴[12 Sep 25 19:19 UTC] No.45225631[source]▶
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
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pil0u ◴[12 Sep 25 20:19 UTC] No.45226293[source]▶
Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
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pfdietz ◴[12 Sep 25 20:25 UTC] No.45226350[source]▶
Even with that, renewables are cheaper.

One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.

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johanyc ◴[12 Sep 25 22:12 UTC] No.45227340[source]▶
The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
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1. pfdietz ◴[12 Sep 25 23:35 UTC] No.45227924[source]▶
With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of).

In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.

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2. Paradigma11 ◴[13 Sep 25 09:52 UTC] No.45230792[source]▶
And we do have detailed weather data for the last 70 years in Europe.

So it should be easy for proponents of renewables plus batteries like you to show that their proposed solutions would have worked all those years.

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3. pfdietz ◴[13 Sep 25 12:30 UTC] No.45231513[source]▶
One can do modeling based on weather data, yes. There's even a web site where you can do that and obtain cost optimized designs (under various cost and technology assumptions): https://model.energy/
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4. tstrimple ◴[13 Sep 25 21:04 UTC] No.45235299{3}[source]▶
Nuclear proponents seem incapable of avoiding the exact same debunked arguments over and over again year after year. Did you know that the sun doesn’t always shine? Checkmate solar power! Bet you never thought of that. I am very clever.
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5. pfdietz ◴[14 Sep 25 12:33 UTC] No.45239333{4}[source]▶
They use the bad arguments because they don't have any good arguments. It's a tell.