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Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC

(www.eesc.europa.eu)
129 points mpweiher | 1 comments | 12 Dec 25 17:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | 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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BigTTYGothGF ◴[12 Dec 25 20:46 UTC] No.46248710[source]▶
> But the world has moved on.

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

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derriz ◴[12 Dec 25 20:59 UTC] No.46248876[source]▶
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.
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1. StopDisinfo910 ◴[13 Dec 25 14:26 UTC] No.46254719[source]▶
China strategy is clearly a mix of renewable and nuclear, renewable for bulk and nuclear for baseload.

At the moment, they are quickly building gaz-fired capacity to supplement the renewable during peak demand and when production is low. Their base load is mostly coal. Nuclear will allow them to phase out most of that. They are clearly targeting zero coal and are gaz poor anyway so nuclear allows them to limit their exposure to imports. That's basically France strategy in the 70s except France went all in while China can use renewable for bulk capacity as they produce a ton of the required mineral themselves

The opposition between intermittent and nuclear doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to run a grid purely on intermittent sources.

A lot of the discussion on statistics here don't make sense. China wants to switch off coal and gaz. You are looking at transition numbers focusing on current shares when you should be considering trajectories.