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Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC

(www.eesc.europa.eu)
129 points mpweiher | 3 comments | 12 Dec 25 17:32 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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DarkNova6 ◴[12 Dec 25 19:40 UTC] No.46247903[source]▶
So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance production. Dependent on resources not found in Europe.

Look, I love nuclear technology. But time has moved on. The costs to rebuild this industry is astronomical and means we lose out on key-future technology like batteries.

Edit: But then there are bombs. And especially French love their nukes due national security. This is the only reason to keep pushing for nuclear, since Russia, the US and China are not gonna change direction on this either. But the very least we could do is be honest about it.

Edit 2: Changed from "World has moved on" to "time has moved on", since evidently China has invested for a good 2 decades to build their own fully functional nuclear-industry. Proving my point that it takes dedicated investment, network effects and scale to rebuild this industry. After all, they too want to mass produce nukes.

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nixass ◴[12 Dec 25 19:45 UTC] No.46247968[source]▶
> Look, I love nuclear technology. But the world has moved on.

Come again?

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iknowstuff ◴[12 Dec 25 19:54 UTC] No.46248065[source]▶
We deploy 10x the capacity in renewables and batteries than we do in nuclear and its only accelerating. We are trending towards 1/10th the cost of nuclear per GW. There is no going back just due to the sheer scale of mass manufacturing renewables.

We are below $1B/GW for solar. China just opened a $100/kWh ($100M/GWh) battery storage plant. All deployable within a year.

Contrast this to $16B/GW for recent nuclear plants, and you don’t benefit from starting a build for another 20 years

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1. mpweiher ◴[12 Dec 25 20:16 UTC] No.46248327[source]▶
Since the capacity factor is so much lower, 10x in capacity just about matches the energy production of nuclear. Never mind the dispatchable power.

And since nuclear power plants last about 4x longer than renewables, you actually have to install 4x the production to have an equivalent fleet over time.

So by your numbers, the world is shifting towards a nuclear fleet.

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2. iknowstuff ◴[12 Dec 25 20:22 UTC] No.46248400[source]▶
Ugh. One of us is living in an alternate reality. If the share of energy produced is not growing increasingly more renewable, then it’s me.
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3. mpweiher ◴[12 Dec 25 21:25 UTC] No.46249165[source]▶
An initial much stronger increase in renewables is a logical an unavoidable consequence of what I described.

The increase in renewable production needs to be 4x greater initially, because of the longer life of nuclear plants. Queueing theory/Little's Law. So this is entirely expected if you are targeting (a) a fairly constant fleet and (b) fairly constant production rate, both of which are desirable.

Under the Messmer plan, France ignored this and built 50+ reactors in 15 years. Which means that they were pretty much done after 15 years, their nuclear industry had basically nothing to do for the next 40 or so years and withered. Bad idea.

The current rate of new construction starts in China implies a build rate of at least 10 reactors per year. With an expected life of 80 years, that implies a target fleet size of around 800 reactors if the rate remains constant.