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.

> But the world has moved on.

China's got 27 reactors under construction right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

In the first 5 months of this year, China added 198 GW of solar PV and 46 GW of wind. Nuclear is a small side-hustle for them.

nameplate capacity of different generation sources can't be compared, if only because capacity factor is not comparable.

China's plan is to add 100GW of nuclear by 2040.

In 2024 alone, it added 360GW of wind and solar and the trajectory for renewables is steepening, not declining so this year's number looks like it will exceed this number - 450GW or more.

Capacity factors are just noise when you're dealing with nearly 2 orders of magnitude of difference in scale. Apply whatever adjustment for capacity factor differences that you like but 100GW of nuclear over 15 years is not going to catch up with 450GW of wind and solar per year.

China has 1,000 GW installed solar and 26 GW of wind which generate 2k TWh/yr. The total installed nuclear in China is a mere 60 GW which generate 450 TWh/yr. Therefore, the capacity factor of solar is 2 TWh/GW and that of nuclear is 4 times higher at 8 TWh/GW.

Calling an 4 times higher capacity factor "noise" is actual noise.

Besides, nuclear provides uninterrupted energy supply, no need for storage or special convenient places for installation. That's why China is building capacity of both types as fast as they can.

Europe is in a colder geographic area with less sunshine and more needs of energy during the cold/rainy days, nuclear is an absolute necessity there.