EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

I am not sure people understand the implications of this.

First, it's not just nuclear, it's also Natural gas.

Second, lots of nations have incentives for "clean" energy. And now magically, all those incentives apply to nuclear and gas.

It's a money grab from nuclear and gas manufacturers. It's not that the courts were involved for nothing.

Still, we should use more nuclear. If only it was less expensive to build...

Nuclear + gas is the climate friendly solution.

Gas isn’t climate friendly just because of its debatable attractiveness vs coal. And nuclear comes with catastrophic risks that require large costs to mitigate. Let’s not pretend it’s some panacea. Renewables are better than both.

Fun fact: The US achieved more for the climate with fracking gas than Germany did with its "Energiewende".

Do you care to explain more, id be interested :)

In 2005, both the US and Germany had specific emissions of around 600g CO₂/kWh.

In 2015, due mostly to fracking gas, the US was down to around 450g CO₂/kWh.

Germany, with its Energiewende, was at around 560g CO₂/kWh.

Because, of course, the Energiewende was not about climate change. It was about shutting down climate-friendly (CO₂ free) nuclear plants.

Both could have done better. France is currently at something like 32g CO₂/kWh and has been at roughly that level for decades.

Shutting down nuclear was a pretty popular policy. But that aside, what the Energiewende was not about was removing obstacles to building out energy infrastructure rapidly (e.g., the delay on the north-south connections).

Well, populism is no good reason to do something dumb. Maybe laymen should not directly have a say over experts in deeply technical discussions.

Yes, not supporting energy infrastructure construction better was a mistake.

Removing what would be nasty targets in a war perhaps in the current light not so much.

No shutting down cheap, reliable, CO₂ free and already paid for energy infrastructure was.

That's about as idiotic as you can get.

And simply by not destroying this already existing infrastructure you wouldn't even have needed north-south links.

Germany could have decarbonized faster by maintaining its nuclear power, but only to a limited extent because the bulk of the coal (especially lignite, a high CO2 emitter) is burned to generate electricity in the former East German regions, which have been devoid of nuclear power since 1995 (Soviet reactors were shut down due to their unsafety). Therefore, all active reactors were located in West Germany, and there is no adequate high-voltage line capable of transporting their output to the East.

At its peak (in 1999), nuclear power produced only 31% of Germany's electricity, itself less than 25% of the energy consumed (even considering primary energy, it only provided 12.7%), and by 2011 (Fukushima...), it was producing less than 18% of the electricity.

Moreover, in the East, coal-fired power plants have long produced high-pressure steam for district heating (industry and heating many premises), which a remote reactor cannot provide.

To claim that Germany shut down its reactors for no reason (after Fukushima...) or that only a minority of environmentalists decided to do so is misleading as, in Germany, all political parties close reactors, and most reactors were not closed by "Greens".

Furthermore, this nuclear potential would result in higher costs and dependency since it would have replaced part of the huge coal industry, which is very difficult to get rid of.

> Germany could have decarbonized faster by maintaining its nuclear power

Precisely.

> but only to a limited extent because the bulk of the coal (especially lignite, a high CO2 emitter) is burned to generate electricity in the former East German regions,

Huh? Not shutting down the existing nuclear plants is a pure positive and does not prevent you from doing other things. Such as building out renewables and/or nuclear plants in the east.

For the money we wasted on intermittent renewables so far, we could have built at least 50 reactors even at the inflated cost of the EPR prototype at Olkiluoto 3. Or 100 inflation-adjusted Konvois. So way more than enough.

Nuclear power is well-suited for district heating and industrial heat applications, unlike solar and wind.

> To claim that Germany shut down its reactors for no reason

Nobody claimed that. Germany shut down its reactors for idiotic reasons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

All West German reactors would have survived the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami perfectly fine had they been at the site of Fukushima. And we don't have Tsunamis in Germany. How does shutting down those plants make sense again? When answering, consider that Japan is reactivating its nuclear plants.

It's time for Germany to admit its mistake on nuclear energy

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/12/26/world/ger...

> or that only a minority of environmentalists decided to do so is misleading as,

Again, such a good thing that that claim wasn't made in this thread. Or are you misleadingly claiming that it was?

> misleading as, in Germany, all political parties close reactors, and most reactors were not closed by "Greens".

Who "closed" reactors, now that actually is misleading for a change. The law that required nuclear reactors to be closed was passed by the Red/Green coalition in 2002. Germany happens to be a country with the rule of law, so successor governments can't just act on whim, they are bound by the law of the land. Oh, and it was the Greens who made the Atomausstieg the primary condition for their coalition with the SPD.

So while it is correct that all parties are somewhat to blame, to claim that they are equally to blame is ahistorical nonsense and quite misleading.

> Furthermore, this nuclear potential would result in higher costs and dependency

That is also not true.

The money Germany "wasted" on renewables brought down prices a lot, triggering massive investments, which was the plan. My prediction is that even France will scale down nuclear power for fiscal reasons alone - they would need to build new reactors now as a long-term replacement - but it does not look too good.

> The money Germany "wasted" on renewables brought down prices a lot,

It massively increased the price of electricity in Germany. And the same holds true of pretty much every other location that tried it.

And it did remarkably little for CO₂ emissions, massively increased our dependence on cheap Russian Gas thus emboldening Putin, cemented our fossil fuel dependence for reliable base load, entrenched our dependence on China.

On the whole, "wasted" is putting it kindly.

Yes, the prices of the generating equipment have come down from truly astronomical to only "not competitive without massive subsidies".

Had we spend the same money on nuclear power plants, we would have long been done with the decarbonization of our electricity sector, and probably well into the electrification and ensuing decarbonization of the other sectors as well.

Except we would have found it difficult to spend that much on nuclear power plants, because even at the price of the messed up EPR prototypes, the same money would have bought us over 50 reactors. At the price of the first three Konvois, around 100, adjusted for inflation and some increases. But when you build 50-100 reactors of the same kind (that's important: don't make every new one different like we used to do), the cost does go down.

France is increasing its fission fleet again, after repealing a law that made such expansion illegal beyond the then existing generating capacity 63.2 GW.

The goal of a reduction of the nuclear share to below 50% was also repealed. I do believe that the share of nuclear in France will decrease somewhat, because intermittent renewables can let the nuclear plants run at higher efficiencies by taking up some of the variability that is currently handled by the nuclear plants.

Come, please do not repeat all this nonsense from the tabloids. First, you need to specify what prices you talk about. If you talk about household prices, then yes those increased. This, btw, was also intentional. The system was designed in this way to encourage energy conservation. It certainly got too far, but this is largely a political issue. In France prices were kept low artificially (which did not help the nuclear industry!). So these prices do tell you exactly nothing about the merits of the technology, and more about politics.

That reliance on Russian gas was increased is complete BS. Only a very small amount of gas which is imported is used for electricity production (10% or so) and it is certainly not true that this (relatively small) amount increased. In 2024, 80 TWh of electricity were produced from gas. In 2010 it was 90 TWh. In that time frame, renewables increased from 105 TWh to 285 TWh. 1.

CO2 emissions went down with roll-out of renewables exactly as expected2) Coal use for electricity production went down from 263 TWh in 2010 to 107 TWh in 2024. In fact, CO2 emission went down faster than planned which is the reason Germany still managed to meet climate targets despite other sectors (heating and transportation) not meeting their targets. That Co2 emissions for electricity production are still higher compared to some others is that there is still a lot of coal in the system (and electricity from that was already exported a lot until recently). But once coal is pushed out completely then this will be gone. The only real conclusion here is that the energy transition was started to late and is not fast enough. The past, nobody can change, but it would certainly be much slower when building nuclear plants now.

France wants to double down on nuclear for political reasons and my prediction is that they will fail because they can not afford it. They have huge fiscal problems and they did not invest enough to renew their nuclear fleet in the past, sold electricity too cheap (so could not build up reserves), and would now have to invest a lot, but their nuclear industry is in a horrible state and their state dept is out of control already.

1.https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/STR... 2.https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/co2-emissionen-pro-kil...