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.

> Look, I love nuclear technology. But the world has moved on.

Come again?

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

Since you use China as a comparison for solar: China builds 1.4GW nuclear power plants in 5 years for $3.5 bn.

And of course the capacity factor for PV is about 10%, so you need 10x the capacity to get the same output even on average. Never mind that you get nothing at night, and very little in winter.

Not 10%. It's a 25% capacity factor for utility scale solar in the US. I'm assuming it's a similar number for China.

In Germany it has now dropped to 8%.

>>It is important to note that within Germany’s generation data, Ember’s analysis has identified an unusual trend of declining solar irradiance-adjusted performance over the past several years. We do not yet have a definitive explanation for why this is, but it could be related to challenges in measuring behind-the-meter solar generation, exacerbated recently by high levels of residential battery storage. Regardless of the cause, it is possible that there is under-reporting of German solar generation.

- European electricity review 2024 by Ember

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...