By "Europe asks" the article means someone wrote a white paper [1].
Europe's energy strategy–together with Russian and American military adventurism and Chinese economic nationalism–probably puts it into a recession this year. I have a lot of respect for the aims of the European project. But as currently structured, I see no mechanism by which hard decisions can be made.
By mechanism and structure are you basically saying they’re too slow and bureaucratic to act in time to avoid a recession? Or that there is literally no way for them to revive nuclear for some reason?
> they’re too slow and bureaucratic to act in time to avoid a recession?
"The energy imports dependency rate in the EU was 57%, which means that nearly 60% of the EU’s energy needs were met by net imports" [1]. To put that in perspective, Sri Lanka–an island nation–has an import dependency ratio of 60% [2].
A European recession is coming because Europe made wrong decisions in the past. I don't know if there is anything it can do in the short term to fix this. Just, potentially, alleviate the pain.
> there is literally no way for them to revive nuclear for some reason?
Nuclear's problem in the West is we overregulate it. I'm not seeing a clear way for the EU to fix this problem, barring France striking a deal in exchange for extending its nuclear-weapons umbrella.
For nuclear, the EU's veto rules mean between Germany's greens and Hungary's Russophilia, nothing transformative can get done.
No, what they should do instead is decentralize energy generation to the point that we're in cockroach mode. And if that means that transportation of goods gets priority over transportation of people then so be it until we've figured that one out.
The sooner we get this over with the better. Install as much solar and wind as we can and get to the point where we have a glut and then back the up with decentralized storage.
Get decentralized to the point that no single point of failure will result in wholesale outages: resilient as cockroaches. You can't do that if you have interconnects that have to work for society to work. The centralized electrical grid was a great idea and it got us very far. But it is just too fragile. Much better if you can have many (millions) of points of generation, storage and consumption and a far more opportunistic level of interconnect.
> decentralized to the point that no single point of failure will result in wholesale outages
This is a good goal. But it needs to be more rigorously defined. Autarky can be done. But then you need to accept North Korean living standards.
> Much better if you can have many (millions) of points of generation, storage and consumption and a far more opportunistic level of interconnect
Again, to a degree. You can't decentrally power a modern city. So that means either no more cities, which is expensive, or ruinously-expensive power in cities, which again, in practice, means de-industrialisation.
> But then you need to accept North Korean living standards.
I'm not sure that's true.
> Again, to a degree. You can't decentrally power a modern city.
I'm not sure that that is true either, but it will take a lot more work than to do this for less densely populated areas. In general I'm not sure if 'modern cities' are long term sustainable.
To be clear, I'm not either. But decentralisation requires sacrificing economies of scale. And total autarky is a proven failure. Between that and complete integration is probably a more-independent equilibrium for Europe. But it will require paying a price.
> In general I'm not sure if 'modern cities' are long term sustainable
Sure. Maybe. Until then, the economies that field them will call the shots. (Based on everything I've read, cities are far more sustainable than dispersed living.)
I don't doubt that it requires paying a price. The only relevant question is whether that price is substantially lower or substantially higher than continuing on our current track. I'm open to be convinced that it is higher but I strongly believe that it is lower because with increased fragility you're playing the dice and one day they'll come up in a way that hurts you. The more people there will be in those baskets that harder it will hurt.
As for the future of cities: the internet has given us one thing: independence from having to go to cities to work. Combine that with the ridiculous energy expense on commuting and it seems like a complete no-brainer that we should just stop doing that. COVID has already shown us that this is far more possible than we ever thought it was.
> It's higher than prevailing prices. And it gets higher the more autarkic and decentralised the system needs to be.
I don't actually think that that is true. If I look at the cost / KWh + the network costs + various subsidies you can probably supply a house for a lifetime if you the energy consumption costs for that same lifetime and spent them up front on decentralized generation + storage.
It's all about the density, not so much about the cost and as the density goes up so do the complications and the costs. But if you have enough ground (which really isn't all that much) it is perfectly doable today, and probably you'll be in the black in a surprisingly low number of years. The higher the cost of oil the higher the cost of gas, and the higher the cost of gas the higher the cost per KWh (this may vary depending on where you live).
> How much extra are your citizens willing to pay every year to reduce supply disruptions?
That's a very good question. Probably not much until it starts to happen regularly, so I would expect that problem to solve itself over time. Energy has been a hot topic for the last decade and with every price shock it is getting easier to convince people that if they had more autonomy they would be less affected. Solar + heatpumps have exploded in Europe in the last decade and that trend has not stopped, in spite of a reduction in net metering. Ironically, the biggest stumbling blocks are the governments that want to tax energy but see no way of doing this if it is generated and consumed on the spot.
That very much depends on where in Canada you are! Canada is huge, and parts of it are further north than even Northern Sweden! But from what I understand most Canadians live in the southern end of the country, which is comparable to Germany. Stockholm is at ~60N for your reference
Nuclear is the answer to our infinite appetite for energy. For the long term, nuclear will be part of the solution.
With that said, there is no such thing as an energy shock right now. Instead, Europe has allies who blatantly attacked a sovereign nation. The answer to that is to condemn and sanction the instigators. What are laws for if they can selectively applied? This is a political problem.
> Nuclear is the answer to our infinite appetite for energy
Approximately 100% of the energy in our solar system radiates from the Sun. Long term, solar is the answer. Nuclear is a really good carrier. In the medium term, we need more energy. Preferably cheap. Ideally clean. Going all in on one mode doesn't make sense because it virtually demand the creation of bottlenecks and single points of failure.
What do we do if another asteroid strikes, raises dust plumes and causes volcanic activity for years? The solution is to diversify renewable energy sources.
Nuclear takes to long to plan and build. If that is fixed, then great.
> solution is to diversify renewable energy sources
There are two economically-viable renewable sources: solar and wind. Everything else is, to put it succinctly, bullshit.
We're not producing and deploying as much solar and wind as we can. But global production has limits. Going all in on just those two (together with batteries) requires massively overpaying. That, in turn, makes the economy uncompetitive.
> Nuclear takes to long to plan and build. If that is fixed, then great
Permitting takes forever, too. Nuclear can be done quicker and cheaper, we've seen China do that. It's a good part of the mix because we just need to add power, and ideally, with economies of scale.
Europe should absolutely develop it. But it's no panacea.
Optimistically, "around 43 GW of enhanced geothermal capacity in the European Union could be developed at costs below 100 €/MWh" [1]. That's 3% of European energy demand [2].
I've been saying exactly this since around 09. Glad to see the rest of Europe is finally catching up.
Yes we should turn to renewables as much as possible, but we should replace fossil powerplants first, and then nuclear.
I'm honestly not sure if 100% renewables is even in the cards for Europe. It's located further north than you probably think [1], which means less sun. Wind is a better fit than solar in the north, but in Sweden we do occasionally get entire weeks with almost no wind, and effectively 0 sun. Hydro is a good alternative for Sweden, and one that is built out extensively.a good thing about hydro is that you can control how much energy it produces to fit demand(ie, produce less energy on windy days). You can't really do that with nuclear.
The entire energy situation in the north is super complex. In the winter any energy source will be profitable, as energy prices skyrocket, sometimes as much as SEK 3/kWh. In the summer however you might end up paying to produce, as energy prices go negative.
The problem with solar panels and arctic seasons is that you get periods with high energy demand alternating with periods of high energy production. And the periods are way too long to bridge with batteries (~3 months).
The extensive solar buildout in Sweden means free energy in the summer, which means a lot of energy production is gonna be a loss leader for around 3-4 months.
And then extreme power shortages where you can charge premium prices during 3-4 winter months, with a brief period of sanity and approximate balance in between
It's a very weird situation, and we're definitely building a sustainable power grid in "hard mode".
On top of that Sweden actually exports energy to Germany, because they decided nuclear power was scary.
A nuclear base production would be my first choice, and then balance primarily wind and hydro for the majority of the remainder. Solar panels are kind of wasted in the north, but a godsend in continental Europe. Ideally Sweden would invest German solar fields, or just cut them off from our already strained grid during the winter months(serves them right for shutting down all their nuclear for no reason, fucking idiots)
> we should turn to renewables as much as possible, but we should replace fossil powerplants first, and then nuclear
Europe needs to be adding power sources. Anyone talking about replacement right now or in the next few years is counterproductively misreading the political situation.
Aye, that was the argument back when replacement was on the table. Now we need to build, and we need to build everything. All the wind, solar, and nuclear we can afford to build. I'd leave coal as a last resort, and oil is absolutely counter productive. We should probably avoid LNG plants too, with the possible exception of Norway.
It was dumb to ever let the nuclear industry and deployment stagnate. That said, I think what Trump is doing, by stacking the NRC with his cronies and quickly approving new reactor designs from companies his friends/family are invested in, is more dangerous than Europe doing nothing.
> Nuclear development is a long-term project, not a short-term fix to current energy insecurity.
Long answer? Still no. Flamanville [1] took 15 years (1o over estimate) and the cost was five times what was projected. Hinkley Point-C [2] is first projected to come online in 2030 (18 years after commencement) and the costs will at least double. Both are mentioned in the article.
The amortized cost of nuclear power makes it among the most expensive forms of electricity generation. And they take forever to build. Not a single nuclear power plants (of the ~700 built in the world) has been built without significant government contributions. And they won't get cheaper. SMR (also mentioned in the article) doesn't make sense. Nuclear plants are better when they're bigger. SMR is just another way of extracting money from the government for dead end research.
Europe as a whole has a history of colonialism. This is the basic for European social democracies: offshorting their problems and costs onto the Global South. They've taken the same approach with energy. In the 2010s, Europe outsourced its energy security to Russia and that has had obvious conseequences for Ukraine.
This was actually an incredibly rare W for the first Trump administration: in 2018 the administration warned Europe of the dangers of Russian gas and badgered Germany into building an LNG port with the Trump-Juncker agreement [3]. This was both correct and fortuitous after Europe suddenly needed to import a lot of LNG from 2022.
Europe also outsources its security to the United States and that's partly why they're in this mess now. Europe is suffering for providing material aid to a war of choice in Iran that they didn't consent to or otherwise want. The article mentions the issue of finding money for defence spending to meet US demands. That's money primarily for US defense contractors. You think that might be an issue?
Renewables, particularly wind and solar, are the path forward. As is divorcing itself from being a US vassal state.
A lot of Europe's policies come down to the failed austerity policies after 2008. Taxing wealth and barring profit shifting to low-tax jurisdictions is the path forward here, not strangling ever-decreasing social safety nets. Austerity is corporate welfare for banks.
Although I'm not a huge proponent of nuclear power over renewables, I'm not sure the overruns in those projects are a good argument. These projects become hard to cost and understand up front because so few are built. If the UK built 10 then the costs would come down and the knowledge and experience would grow.
That's the problem: the cost doesn't really go down. You can only operate nuclear if you guarantee the prices a decade ahead. That's just not realistic and the end result is that you'll end up subsidizing ever KWh produced and then you still have to factor in decommissioning costs. Nuclear is fantastic technology, but we can do so much better.
They're hard to cost, which means that the numbers that are given are more aspirational than realistic. It's in the interest of those touting projects to be as optimistic as is tolerable when the estimate costs -- and everyone expects them to do this, so if they didn't and were more realistic they'd go nowhere.
Cost overruns are a great argument even if you ignore the massive time overruns, which you can't. All those cost overruns factor into the electricty price forever. Flamanville has a 60 year lifespan for this reason and even then has an estimated cost of €138/MWh [1]. Compare that to Cestas at €108/MWh [2].
Go further south and Spain has recently been paying €25/MWh [3].
Is it worth the price of energy sovereignty though? You are not just buying electricity, you are buying future independence.
It might be worth it if you factor that in.
And don’t forget all the other expertise that comes from being a country that is able to build reliable nuclear reactors. China is _the_ production superpower not just because it can build x or y, it’s because it has all the supply chains to be able to do it at scale.
If a country invests into that expertise - you get a lot of very capable engineers, a lot of tech and supply chains to deal with making it all happen, again and again, at scale. That in itself would be something that can offset the raw “price” of a single reactor, though it is very hard to quantify.
Like how much has USA actually lost by relinquishing its historical role of guarding international trade? Maybe it won some independence, but maybe the upstream effects to its economy would be bad?
We don’t know for sure about nuclear, but when a similar scientific project was put on a national scale - the space race - USA got silicon valley out of it.
> Renewables, particularly wind and solar, are the path forward
You missed the asterisk where endless dependence on coal, gas or oil is a non-optional requirement.
Who the hell cares if nuclear is expensive to get going? Plenty of things cost a lot - healthcare, social spending, roads, all of it. Those war machines that exist to prop up the fossil fuel industry cost a pretty penny as well. It's only when we get to nuclear that the talking point becomes cost. If governments don't even want to provide energy independence then perhaps they should end the slavery they call income tax.
Ah yes, the sun shines at night and wind comes from trees. If you can name a country using solar and wind that isn't dependent on fossil fuels I'd love to hear about it.
> The only things that ever comes up in elections about energy is the price.
Yeah, because solar and wind are both expensive and unreliable, and fossil fuels are both expensive and destructive. The point is that the price isn't worth it.
> There is still no long time storage for the nuclear waste.
This is a non-argument, just like it was last year.
> And even if we ignore that. People are worried about drones flying over airports. Wait when drones fly over nuclear power plants.
2026, new argument dropped. Almost as much of a non-argument as the one above.
> Talking about energy independence, what do you think where the nuclear fuel comes from?
> BTW if you don’t want to pay the membership fee of a country aka taxes, you’re free to leave
The membership fee isn't giving up your money, the membership fee is participating in improving the country. It's this backwards ethos that has most European countries in the toilet.
Not arguing that solar+wind are more and more viable and economical.
But there's a weird juxtaposition here: You criticize the fact that nuclear power must be subsidized to be accomplished, but support strong social safety nets. To me, relative energy independence is a core societal goal and nuclear is a hell of a lot better than coal or oil or NG. It still requires fissile material, though.
in 2018 the administration warned Europe of the dangers of Russian gas and badgered Germany into building an LNG port with the Trump-Juncker agreement
I don’t know how fair that is. Modern leaders looked at Appeasement in pre-WW2 and thought they could pull it off by tying their economies to that of their enemy so that war would be ruinous for both. It didn’t work but only because we now know China is bankrolling Russia’s sham economy.
All the smart people said fossil fuels bad and renewables were the answer. Now not so much? Nuke is good but why not try lighter regulation, less central planning, and less trying to be smarter than the market and science. Stifling energy innovation and flexibility with central planning is never going to get efficient clean and sufficient energy to support a healthy growing economy that leads to growing standard of living for all.
By "Europe asks" the article means someone wrote a white paper [1].
Europe's energy strategy–together with Russian and American military adventurism and Chinese economic nationalism–probably puts it into a recession this year. I have a lot of respect for the aims of the European project. But as currently structured, I see no mechanism by which hard decisions can be made.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
By mechanism and structure are you basically saying they’re too slow and bureaucratic to act in time to avoid a recession? Or that there is literally no way for them to revive nuclear for some reason?
There is very little hope. Restarting plants that have been offline for years is not simple, and building new ones is a decades long venture.
Either approach would take too long.
> they’re too slow and bureaucratic to act in time to avoid a recession?
"The energy imports dependency rate in the EU was 57%, which means that nearly 60% of the EU’s energy needs were met by net imports" [1]. To put that in perspective, Sri Lanka–an island nation–has an import dependency ratio of 60% [2].
A European recession is coming because Europe made wrong decisions in the past. I don't know if there is anything it can do in the short term to fix this. Just, potentially, alleviate the pain.
> there is literally no way for them to revive nuclear for some reason?
Nuclear's problem in the West is we overregulate it. I'm not seeing a clear way for the EU to fix this problem, barring France striking a deal in exchange for extending its nuclear-weapons umbrella.
For nuclear, the EU's veto rules mean between Germany's greens and Hungary's Russophilia, nothing transformative can get done.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/w...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.IMP.CONS.ZS?most_rec...
No, what they should do instead is decentralize energy generation to the point that we're in cockroach mode. And if that means that transportation of goods gets priority over transportation of people then so be it until we've figured that one out.
The sooner we get this over with the better. Install as much solar and wind as we can and get to the point where we have a glut and then back the up with decentralized storage.
> cockroach mode
What does this mean?
Get decentralized to the point that no single point of failure will result in wholesale outages: resilient as cockroaches. You can't do that if you have interconnects that have to work for society to work. The centralized electrical grid was a great idea and it got us very far. But it is just too fragile. Much better if you can have many (millions) of points of generation, storage and consumption and a far more opportunistic level of interconnect.
> decentralized to the point that no single point of failure will result in wholesale outages
This is a good goal. But it needs to be more rigorously defined. Autarky can be done. But then you need to accept North Korean living standards.
> Much better if you can have many (millions) of points of generation, storage and consumption and a far more opportunistic level of interconnect
Again, to a degree. You can't decentrally power a modern city. So that means either no more cities, which is expensive, or ruinously-expensive power in cities, which again, in practice, means de-industrialisation.
> But then you need to accept North Korean living standards.
I'm not sure that's true.
> Again, to a degree. You can't decentrally power a modern city.
I'm not sure that that is true either, but it will take a lot more work than to do this for less densely populated areas. In general I'm not sure if 'modern cities' are long term sustainable.
> not sure that's true
To be clear, I'm not either. But decentralisation requires sacrificing economies of scale. And total autarky is a proven failure. Between that and complete integration is probably a more-independent equilibrium for Europe. But it will require paying a price.
> In general I'm not sure if 'modern cities' are long term sustainable
Sure. Maybe. Until then, the economies that field them will call the shots. (Based on everything I've read, cities are far more sustainable than dispersed living.)
> But it will require paying a price.
I don't doubt that it requires paying a price. The only relevant question is whether that price is substantially lower or substantially higher than continuing on our current track. I'm open to be convinced that it is higher but I strongly believe that it is lower because with increased fragility you're playing the dice and one day they'll come up in a way that hurts you. The more people there will be in those baskets that harder it will hurt.
As for the future of cities: the internet has given us one thing: independence from having to go to cities to work. Combine that with the ridiculous energy expense on commuting and it seems like a complete no-brainer that we should just stop doing that. COVID has already shown us that this is far more possible than we ever thought it was.
> relevant question is whether that price is substantially lower or substantially higher than continuing on our current track
It's higher than prevailing prices. And it gets higher the more autarkic and decentralised the system needs to be.
> with increased fragility you're playing the dice and one day they'll come up in a way that hurts you
Agree. It looks like insurance pricing. How much extra are your citizens willing to pay every year to reduce supply disruptions?
> It's higher than prevailing prices. And it gets higher the more autarkic and decentralised the system needs to be.
I don't actually think that that is true. If I look at the cost / KWh + the network costs + various subsidies you can probably supply a house for a lifetime if you the energy consumption costs for that same lifetime and spent them up front on decentralized generation + storage.
It's all about the density, not so much about the cost and as the density goes up so do the complications and the costs. But if you have enough ground (which really isn't all that much) it is perfectly doable today, and probably you'll be in the black in a surprisingly low number of years. The higher the cost of oil the higher the cost of gas, and the higher the cost of gas the higher the cost per KWh (this may vary depending on where you live).
> How much extra are your citizens willing to pay every year to reduce supply disruptions?
That's a very good question. Probably not much until it starts to happen regularly, so I would expect that problem to solve itself over time. Energy has been a hot topic for the last decade and with every price shock it is getting easier to convince people that if they had more autonomy they would be less affected. Solar + heatpumps have exploded in Europe in the last decade and that trend has not stopped, in spite of a reduction in net metering. Ironically, the biggest stumbling blocks are the governments that want to tax energy but see no way of doing this if it is generated and consumed on the spot.
Centralization of power distribution is a national security risk in every country.
The only problem is that we have to convince the centralized power industries to give up their complete control of our local and global economies.
I have been thinking about this for decades, as the path forward has been obvious for that long. Those in control just keep doubling down.
It appears that they would rather destroy our ecosystems, and risk economic collapse, instead of just adjusting their investment strategies.
Precisely. But if it isn't clear now then the only way it will become clear will be through catastrophe.
Then catastrophe it is!
But seriously, that appears to be the trajectory.
This sounds nice and all, but also very very hard in Scandinavia. Not impossible though, there's at least one guy who's done it!
https://h2roadtrip.com/mr-hydrogen-sweden-lives-almost-a-dec...
Rather extreme, but technically possible!
I did it in Canada where the winters and latitude are very comparable to Scandinavia.
That very much depends on where in Canada you are! Canada is huge, and parts of it are further north than even Northern Sweden! But from what I understand most Canadians live in the southern end of the country, which is comparable to Germany. Stockholm is at ~60N for your reference
Nuclear is the answer to our infinite appetite for energy. For the long term, nuclear will be part of the solution.
With that said, there is no such thing as an energy shock right now. Instead, Europe has allies who blatantly attacked a sovereign nation. The answer to that is to condemn and sanction the instigators. What are laws for if they can selectively applied? This is a political problem.
> Nuclear is the answer to our infinite appetite for energy
Approximately 100% of the energy in our solar system radiates from the Sun. Long term, solar is the answer. Nuclear is a really good carrier. In the medium term, we need more energy. Preferably cheap. Ideally clean. Going all in on one mode doesn't make sense because it virtually demand the creation of bottlenecks and single points of failure.
What do we do if another asteroid strikes, raises dust plumes and causes volcanic activity for years? The solution is to diversify renewable energy sources.
Nuclear takes to long to plan and build. If that is fixed, then great.
> What do we do if another asteroid strikes, raises dust plumes and causes volcanic activity for years?
A few nuclear plants will do absolutely nothing against a nuclear winter.
> solution is to diversify renewable energy sources
There are two economically-viable renewable sources: solar and wind. Everything else is, to put it succinctly, bullshit.
We're not producing and deploying as much solar and wind as we can. But global production has limits. Going all in on just those two (together with batteries) requires massively overpaying. That, in turn, makes the economy uncompetitive.
> Nuclear takes to long to plan and build. If that is fixed, then great
Permitting takes forever, too. Nuclear can be done quicker and cheaper, we've seen China do that. It's a good part of the mix because we just need to add power, and ideally, with economies of scale.
Geothermal is also looking promising, probably more so than nuclear.
> Geothermal is also looking promising
Europe should absolutely develop it. But it's no panacea.
Optimistically, "around 43 GW of enhanced geothermal capacity in the European Union could be developed at costs below 100 €/MWh" [1]. That's 3% of European energy demand [2].
[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/hot-stuff-geotherma...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... 36.6k PJ/year ~ 1,160 GW
Especially in the eiffel region.
I've been saying exactly this since around 09. Glad to see the rest of Europe is finally catching up.
Yes we should turn to renewables as much as possible, but we should replace fossil powerplants first, and then nuclear.
I'm honestly not sure if 100% renewables is even in the cards for Europe. It's located further north than you probably think [1], which means less sun. Wind is a better fit than solar in the north, but in Sweden we do occasionally get entire weeks with almost no wind, and effectively 0 sun. Hydro is a good alternative for Sweden, and one that is built out extensively.a good thing about hydro is that you can control how much energy it produces to fit demand(ie, produce less energy on windy days). You can't really do that with nuclear.
The entire energy situation in the north is super complex. In the winter any energy source will be profitable, as energy prices skyrocket, sometimes as much as SEK 3/kWh. In the summer however you might end up paying to produce, as energy prices go negative.
The problem with solar panels and arctic seasons is that you get periods with high energy demand alternating with periods of high energy production. And the periods are way too long to bridge with batteries (~3 months).
The extensive solar buildout in Sweden means free energy in the summer, which means a lot of energy production is gonna be a loss leader for around 3-4 months.
And then extreme power shortages where you can charge premium prices during 3-4 winter months, with a brief period of sanity and approximate balance in between
It's a very weird situation, and we're definitely building a sustainable power grid in "hard mode".
On top of that Sweden actually exports energy to Germany, because they decided nuclear power was scary.
A nuclear base production would be my first choice, and then balance primarily wind and hydro for the majority of the remainder. Solar panels are kind of wasted in the north, but a godsend in continental Europe. Ideally Sweden would invest German solar fields, or just cut them off from our already strained grid during the winter months(serves them right for shutting down all their nuclear for no reason, fucking idiots)
[1]https://youtube.com/shorts/C7-t_Ya6gI4?si=3EnxpFce59-VZb8B
> we should turn to renewables as much as possible, but we should replace fossil powerplants first, and then nuclear
Europe needs to be adding power sources. Anyone talking about replacement right now or in the next few years is counterproductively misreading the political situation.
Aye, that was the argument back when replacement was on the table. Now we need to build, and we need to build everything. All the wind, solar, and nuclear we can afford to build. I'd leave coal as a last resort, and oil is absolutely counter productive. We should probably avoid LNG plants too, with the possible exception of Norway.
It was dumb to ever let the nuclear industry and deployment stagnate. That said, I think what Trump is doing, by stacking the NRC with his cronies and quickly approving new reactor designs from companies his friends/family are invested in, is more dangerous than Europe doing nothing.
Short answer? No:
> Nuclear development is a long-term project, not a short-term fix to current energy insecurity.
Long answer? Still no. Flamanville [1] took 15 years (1o over estimate) and the cost was five times what was projected. Hinkley Point-C [2] is first projected to come online in 2030 (18 years after commencement) and the costs will at least double. Both are mentioned in the article.
The amortized cost of nuclear power makes it among the most expensive forms of electricity generation. And they take forever to build. Not a single nuclear power plants (of the ~700 built in the world) has been built without significant government contributions. And they won't get cheaper. SMR (also mentioned in the article) doesn't make sense. Nuclear plants are better when they're bigger. SMR is just another way of extracting money from the government for dead end research.
Europe as a whole has a history of colonialism. This is the basic for European social democracies: offshorting their problems and costs onto the Global South. They've taken the same approach with energy. In the 2010s, Europe outsourced its energy security to Russia and that has had obvious conseequences for Ukraine.
This was actually an incredibly rare W for the first Trump administration: in 2018 the administration warned Europe of the dangers of Russian gas and badgered Germany into building an LNG port with the Trump-Juncker agreement [3]. This was both correct and fortuitous after Europe suddenly needed to import a lot of LNG from 2022.
Europe also outsources its security to the United States and that's partly why they're in this mess now. Europe is suffering for providing material aid to a war of choice in Iran that they didn't consent to or otherwise want. The article mentions the issue of finding money for defence spending to meet US demands. That's money primarily for US defense contractors. You think that might be an issue?
Renewables, particularly wind and solar, are the path forward. As is divorcing itself from being a US vassal state.
A lot of Europe's policies come down to the failed austerity policies after 2008. Taxing wealth and barring profit shifting to low-tax jurisdictions is the path forward here, not strangling ever-decreasing social safety nets. Austerity is corporate welfare for banks.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
[3]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-lng-europe-after-trump-junc...
Although I'm not a huge proponent of nuclear power over renewables, I'm not sure the overruns in those projects are a good argument. These projects become hard to cost and understand up front because so few are built. If the UK built 10 then the costs would come down and the knowledge and experience would grow.
That's the problem: the cost doesn't really go down. You can only operate nuclear if you guarantee the prices a decade ahead. That's just not realistic and the end result is that you'll end up subsidizing ever KWh produced and then you still have to factor in decommissioning costs. Nuclear is fantastic technology, but we can do so much better.
They're hard to cost, which means that the numbers that are given are more aspirational than realistic. It's in the interest of those touting projects to be as optimistic as is tolerable when the estimate costs -- and everyone expects them to do this, so if they didn't and were more realistic they'd go nowhere.
Cost overruns are a great argument even if you ignore the massive time overruns, which you can't. All those cost overruns factor into the electricty price forever. Flamanville has a 60 year lifespan for this reason and even then has an estimated cost of €138/MWh [1]. Compare that to Cestas at €108/MWh [2].
Go further south and Spain has recently been paying €25/MWh [3].
[1]: https://www.powermag.com/flamanville-3-europes-hard-won-nucl...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/currencies/new-frenc...
[3]: https://ratedpower.com/blog/spanish-government-solar/
Compare it to Swedish electricity prices in the winter which are around SEK 3/kWh, or roughly €300/MWh.
Are you offering to cut my energy bill in half? Yes please!
Is it worth the price of energy sovereignty though? You are not just buying electricity, you are buying future independence. It might be worth it if you factor that in.
And don’t forget all the other expertise that comes from being a country that is able to build reliable nuclear reactors. China is _the_ production superpower not just because it can build x or y, it’s because it has all the supply chains to be able to do it at scale.
If a country invests into that expertise - you get a lot of very capable engineers, a lot of tech and supply chains to deal with making it all happen, again and again, at scale. That in itself would be something that can offset the raw “price” of a single reactor, though it is very hard to quantify.
Like how much has USA actually lost by relinquishing its historical role of guarding international trade? Maybe it won some independence, but maybe the upstream effects to its economy would be bad?
We don’t know for sure about nuclear, but when a similar scientific project was put on a national scale - the space race - USA got silicon valley out of it.
Has Germant's Energewiende helped with solving this energy issue?
Given how much the administration under Merkel tried to block it: yes
And by the money the energy companies made by keeping some of the fossil plants alive.
> Renewables, particularly wind and solar, are the path forward
You missed the asterisk where endless dependence on coal, gas or oil is a non-optional requirement.
Who the hell cares if nuclear is expensive to get going? Plenty of things cost a lot - healthcare, social spending, roads, all of it. Those war machines that exist to prop up the fossil fuel industry cost a pretty penny as well. It's only when we get to nuclear that the talking point becomes cost. If governments don't even want to provide energy independence then perhaps they should end the slavery they call income tax.
> You missed the asterisk where endless dependence on coal, gas or oil is a non-optional requirement.
Please don't lie like this. Renewables do not require endless dependence on fossil fuels.
Ah yes, the sun shines at night and wind comes from trees. If you can name a country using solar and wind that isn't dependent on fossil fuels I'd love to hear about it.
> Who the hell cares if nuclear is expensive to get going? The people care.
The only things that ever comes up in elections about energy is the price.
But let’s ignore the price.
There is still no long time storage for the nuclear waste.
And even if we ignore that. People are worried about drones flying over airports. Wait when drones fly over nuclear power plants.
I don’t hear much worries in wars that rockets could hit a WEC.
Talking about energy independence, what do you think where the nuclear fuel comes from?
BTW if you don’t want to pay the membership fee of a country aka taxes, you’re free to leave
> The only things that ever comes up in elections about energy is the price.
Yeah, because solar and wind are both expensive and unreliable, and fossil fuels are both expensive and destructive. The point is that the price isn't worth it.
> There is still no long time storage for the nuclear waste.
This is a non-argument, just like it was last year.
> And even if we ignore that. People are worried about drones flying over airports. Wait when drones fly over nuclear power plants.
2026, new argument dropped. Almost as much of a non-argument as the one above.
> Talking about energy independence, what do you think where the nuclear fuel comes from?
There's uranium everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r... and it's not much more of a search away to find out who already refines it.
> BTW if you don’t want to pay the membership fee of a country aka taxes, you’re free to leave
The membership fee isn't giving up your money, the membership fee is participating in improving the country. It's this backwards ethos that has most European countries in the toilet.
> But let’s ignore the price
I mean, European energy policy in a nutshell.
Not arguing that solar+wind are more and more viable and economical.
But there's a weird juxtaposition here: You criticize the fact that nuclear power must be subsidized to be accomplished, but support strong social safety nets. To me, relative energy independence is a core societal goal and nuclear is a hell of a lot better than coal or oil or NG. It still requires fissile material, though.
It requires 15 years from plan to energy being produced, at best. We don’t have all that time.
The best time to plant a tree was 15 years ago. The second best time is now.
in 2018 the administration warned Europe of the dangers of Russian gas and badgered Germany into building an LNG port with the Trump-Juncker agreement
I don’t know how fair that is. Modern leaders looked at Appeasement in pre-WW2 and thought they could pull it off by tying their economies to that of their enemy so that war would be ruinous for both. It didn’t work but only because we now know China is bankrolling Russia’s sham economy.
All the smart people said fossil fuels bad and renewables were the answer. Now not so much? Nuke is good but why not try lighter regulation, less central planning, and less trying to be smarter than the market and science. Stifling energy innovation and flexibility with central planning is never going to get efficient clean and sufficient energy to support a healthy growing economy that leads to growing standard of living for all.