And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
For already developed nations predictions are for electricity to double but energy use to halve at the same time as they electrify end uses.
apples and oranges
Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relative energy ghetto.
I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail
They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.
In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.
An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.
Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.
Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
The cost of coal increases a bit, maybe due to geopolicital issues: ok, seems legit
The cost of nuclear increases .. why ? Why the step between 2016 and 2017 ? Does tech "de-improved" ?
More insights would be interesting
Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).
All other forms of productivity have gone up drastically. However construction productivity remains stuck at a constant. And as other areas are more productive, we need to still pay those in construction competitive wages or else they would switch to more productive jobs with higher wages. (Let's just elide the disconnect between wages rising fully with productivity increases, but they do rise some!)
Despite being far more wealthy today than centuries ago, we don't build cathedrals with super intricate stonework, because labor is so much more expensive.
I fear that nuclear is like the gothic cathedral: something that was far easier to do when labor costs were low, but at wealth increases it becomes far more difficult to make economic sense.
But of course the marginal market is not the whole story. In reality solar largely receives effectively fixed prices in most markets (via CfDs or PPAs). Nuclear does the same and can also take capacity payments and sell into flexibility markets where those exist.
I'm also not sure if heat pump is a solution for multifamily apartments.
Nuclear power also used to get built with PPAs. Look at Hinkley Point C for a completely insanely expensive contract, that EDF is now looking to make to make a loss on.
For Sizewell C they don’t even dare touch a fixed price contract and instead want the ratepayers to pay the construction cost in advance hoping it works out.
That is how far nuclear power has fallen.
PPAs between commercial entities of course also adapt to the market. To guarantee the nuclear price at daytime comes with a corresponding discount, because the ones buying the PPA know they can get what they need either way.
Nuclear power also generally does not participate in ancillary markets. Too slow and inflexible with weighting too much on CAPEX. They can get capacity payments but as soon as the true need is defined in terms of how much reliable energy is needed for how long renewables with carbon neutral gas turbine based backups win.
The only market civilian nuclear power wins is the ”I want to have a workforce and industry capable of building nuclear weapons and naval reactors”.
Essentially a military jobs program. That may be worthwhile, but let stop pretending nuclear power actually gives a modern grid anything it need at the current costs.
no, it doesn't require good isolation. Good isolation is beneficial, like for type of heating.
Radiators don't have an effect on isolation. However, modern radiators usually have a way higher surface area, which allows heating rooms with lower water temperature.
Heat pumps are more efficient if the difference between source and target temperature is closer.
Just that tiny amount of land is enough to supply the entire world's energy needs, if covered with solar panels.
Power line transmission losses are negligible. We don't need to put solar directly at the site, just as we don't need to put nuclear directly at the site of energy use. The round trip efficiency of energy storage is accounted for in the cost of the storage, whether that storage is hydro, battery, or hydrogen.
Solar really is the holy grail of energy: super cheap, super scalable big, super scalable small, and highly distributable or centralized. Pair that with the incredible cheapness of current batteries, and their falling prices in future years, and we are looking at a future of incredible energy abundance. As long as we are willing to accept it.
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
Solar is the current cheapest and will be the biggest source of electricity in 2033 and continue to accelerate away from others for the rest of the century.
Offshore wind helps their situation somewhat.
For context I work at a company in Japan working on this problem. The entire reason the company exists is Japan's energy policy in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Batteries are severely underutilized in Japan at this point in time, so we can at least vastly improve on where we are.
Since you're in the industry, maybe you can answer this question and change my mind.
2. Just electric heating, if electricity is cheap enough. Very simple and cheap.
But yeah, heat pumps make that more efficient. At significant higher investment costs. Gotta do the math of whether it is more efficient overall to invest in an efficient energy producer (nuclear), efficient consumers (heat pumps) or both.
Heat (at 600 C) is potentially even cheaper to store, with a cost of storage capacity as low as $0.10/kWh(th) of capacity. This could yield 365/24/7 heat for $3/GJ, competitive even with cheap natural gas.
https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/building-ultra-cheap-ene...
Round trip efficiency if you go back to electricity is nothing great, but this is not important for very long term storage, where capex is king, not RTE.
Hmm. "... if electricity is cheap enough."
> Nuclear district heating would be very difficult to retrofit.
Who said anything about retrofitting? Just build district heating nuclear plants.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sollid_denmark-to-investigate...
Again, building one nuclear plant is expensive. But building tens or hundreds of thousands of heat pumps is certainly also and likely even more expensive.
They can manufacture 80 GWh a year. To get through dunkelflaute with moderate renewable percentage we need tens of TWh. Not to belittle Tesla, but that's 3 orders of magnitude difference.
Are you changing your mind or can you give me numbers to change mine?