Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC

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.

> So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired.

This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?

If you are so smug about this, answer me:

1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?

2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?

3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?

The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.

  > If you are so smug about this, answer me:

Please adhere to the HN guidelines and refrain from this kind of language. We can discuss this more civilly.

But I'll answer what I can, assuming your are genuine.

  > 1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?

10 reactors, 3 plants. (57 are currently operational)

I think this is a more American-centric comment than you realized... France had a bigger rollout in the 80's and a few from the 90's so there's another decade (*making this time key!*) before a slow decline. Also remember that France is a lot smaller than America so needs less power.

Not to mention, France exports a lot of electricity[0]. I want you to look pretty closely at that graph again. It says they exported 81.8TW this year. What's France's nuclear capacity? 380TW[1]. France exports about 15% of its total energy, more than all its hydro (it's next biggest source). You may be interested to see where that electricity goes....[2]

France can lose those reactors and be fine, Europe is a different story...

  > 2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?

4, In Russia. But France built 2 reactors in 2002.

  > 3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?

I don't have an answer to this but

  > the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist

I can tell you that both France and the US are the biggest supporters of international aid in China's rollout. So the institutional knowledge exists and still progressing, albeit slower than before.

Besides, I'm not sure this fear even makes sense. What, China could "start from scratch" but "France" (or anywhere else) couldn't? What would make China so unique that such things couldn't be replicated elsewhere? This is a fallacy in logic making the assumption that once skills atrophy that they can never be restored or restore more slowly. If anything we tend to see skills restore far quicker from atrophy than from scratch! So why paint a picture of "give up"? Isn't that just making a self-fulfilling prophecy?

[0] https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/exchanges/import...

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/72h/hourly