Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back

The past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide.

See full article...

 

[niwax]

Energy prices have come down a lot recently (from 45c to 25c/kWh). And the fact that we sometimes pay neighbors to take our electricity proves that a European network exists and works as intended. We want Norway and Austria to take our cheap solar power and then sell us hydropower when we need it. And our neighbors are allowed to make money in this deal, we do too since this stabilizes our energy costs.

Quoting retail energy prices in Germany compared to France or other countries is probably the biggest piece of nonsense anti-renewables people can trot out to confuse thos who don't understand the situation.

The issue is that the entire local grid is privatized and taxed, and energy providers are a competitive market that run virtual grids over those. So I get my electricity from a provider who then pays my local grid operator for use of their services, as well as whoever else is needed to transmit their power. As of the latest bill, only 38% of the price I pay is for energy generation and sales. 22% is passed through directly to commercial grid operators, and 40% goes to taxes and fees that themselves go into subsidies for the grid. Factor those out, and the actual price paid is 10-15c/kWh, same as in any other western country. Which shouldn't come as much of a shock, considering basic economics for a fungible good.

This is the same reason we need heavy regulation to make home solar viable and why a lot of people install battery storage. When the grid charges you 10c for electricity and 25c for transmission, putting 1kWh back in would net you 10c in revenue but cost 25c in fees. People I talked to on a recent trip to Sweden would never think about installing their own storage because the can sell electricity to the grid at spot prices.

 

[PascalRH]

German here.

And no word about the recent scandal that parts of the government manipulated expert reports to push through their ideology-driven agenda?

German here too.

Fortunately, this so called ,,scandal“ is simple non-existent. Blown out of proportions by the center-right and of course far-right parties and the newspaper attached to them.
There had been minor discrepancies within the Department of Commerce under Minister Habeck, preparing his talking points and suggestions to the public, explaining the decision to shut down the last NPP after three additional month. Nothing of the apocalypse stated by the center-right and far-right happenend. The proposed ,,Dunkelflaute“ and Blackouts being promoted by them every year is just a nightmare for the easy-to-be-scared.

 

[Eldorito]

Fuel cost is basically nothing in the overall cost of the nuclear power plant.

Erm, no it's not. If you read the report I linked to, it's $5 per MWh in Russia and $10 elsewhere. And that was in 2020, when uranium prices were about a third of what they are now.

You can't just keep dismissing things you don't like without any kind of factual evidence, or referring to reports that don't back up what you say at all (well you can, but it's pointless)

The amount of nameplate capacity that you can rely on being available at all times.

Well considering that solar is zero at night, when there is also little demand, you can see why it doesn't really line up.

In Germany? Yes, periodically. There's a special word for that now: Dunkelflaute.


You don't get it. Germany (and much of the Northern Europe) periodically experiences prolonged periods that combine low wind, little sun (due to cloud cover and short winter days), and low temperatures. There's simply almost nothing to store, any short-term storage would just sit empty.

Neat, never heard of that one.

That seems a fairly straight forward problem to solve via storage and distribution though, the same solution for the existing solar problem (peak supply and peak demand don't align). It is a rare occasion that it lasts more than a day and is at most a couple of hundred hours over an entire year.

Building enough nuclear for the entire grid because of a few days of low renewable output is a horrible solution to that specific problem, considering the capital cost of hundreds of billions.

 

[ralphnobody]

The usual bad actors, but you’re supporting ghg and “clean coal”.

It’d be funny if we weren’t living in the midst of a slow-boil disaster.

The article is strange. What is the author hoping to achieve when they’re so blatantly cherry-picking?

 

[maddanio]

It’s questionable to call wind and solar “decentralized”. The reality is that most solar setups use grid following inverters and produce nothing without access to the electrical grid. A truly off-grid solar system with enough storage to last through the winter is vastly more expensive than most people can afford. So while you may not be beholden to the company that owns the nuclear power station, you’re as dependent as ever on the central authority that operates the grid.

weeell, as much as you are dependent on the central authority that operates the roads, water lines, sewage...its called the government. its a public good really. keeping renewable energy locally does not make much sense, as it is so variable. sure, you can bank on batteries, but with a well tuned grid you need way less storage. cooperation, ya know?

 

[Hagen Stein]

They said it all, "The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralized nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream."

Environmentalism for many activists is a religion. As most religions its based on faith and belief, not science or fact.

Funnily enough, those "faith-based believers" were/are right. The future of energy production in densely populated countries like Germany is distributed renewables.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Right. Merkel's biggest failure detente and engaging with russia importing nat gas. How’d that workout Merkel? Just stood by with first 2014 invasion and seizing Crimea. Like Chamberlain appeasing hitler. That just emboldened putin to invade again. We should send Merkel the bill hundred billion plus to send arms to Ukraine.

Myeah, but to be extremely fair, Merkel never had a chance not to go all-in on russian gas.

Her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, spent his last few days in office hurriedly signing Nord Stream 2 into being, leaving Merkel with a fait accomplí she had no real ability to back out of without taking a massive political and economical hit.

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/h...d-gerhard-schroder-s-legacy-in-shambles-55267
And of course, it didn't take long for Putin's best German friend to take seats at the boards of the russian gas giants once he was out of political office.

I'm not really a fan of Merkel but where Russia is concerned she wasn't really left with many choices, courtesy of Putin having bought himself a staunch defender in her predecessor.

 

[Hagen Stein]

ETA: The main critique I have of Germany closing their nuclear plants is that thanks to the growth of renewables, they could have just about replaced all dirty sources of power with clean sources if they had only kept their nuclear plants open.

In hindsight we ofc know better.

But keep in mind - and the article doesn't a good job to portray that IMHO, we could already be 100% renewables if the conservatives didn't reverse the decision to phase out nuclear power and stopping subsidies for the renewable energy sector and then reverse that decision again.

Also: the few remaining nuclear plants already ran on special permits. Their scheduled and mandatory maintenance and security check has been dropped to extend their life-spawn. Now, if we would have considered to not shut them down for good, this security inspection and maintenance would have been needed. Meaning: taking the plants down for a year.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Germany has the second highest electricity rates in the EU. France, with all those "expensive" nuclear plants, has below average rates.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/...the-cheapest-and-most-expensive-electricity-a
Radiation doses from airborne effluents of a coal-fired plant may be greater than those from a nuclear plant.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0048969780901278
I think the Russian aggression against Ukraine also makes nuclear power concerning. Bombing a coal powered plant does not have the same consequences as that of a nuclear plant. Germany had direct experience with massive bombing attacks during WWII. With that taken into account, the German hostility to nuclear power is understandable.

Although that point is fair enough, the motive for Germany backing off from nuclear the way they did was very much not based in rationality. Die Grünen did, it has to be said, a lot of good when it came to insisting on stricter anti-pollution laws but...where nuclear was concerned none of the actual drawbacks were even offered. Instead it was a religious chanting of all the long-debunked threats, as if a german nuclear power plant was a badly designed russian plutonium boiler manned by vodka-sodden underpaid and badly educated workers.

Don't get me wrong here - Germany shutting down nuclear power in favor of sustainables is a good thing. The timing, however, couldn't be worse. If Germany had the energy budget to spare then shutting down the coal plants first should have been the priority.
We will miss the IPCC's deadlines for peak coal, peak oil, and peak gas as is. That means we, and future generations, will be paying far more, for far longer, than if we had managed to shut down coal plants rather than the nuclear ones.

The priority of energy politics became ideological rather than based on evidence. Which to at least some extent means we're now exacerbating what we are really trying to save here.

 

[Hagen Stein]

Germany has the second highest electricity rates in the EU. France, with all those "expensive" nuclear plants, has below average rates.

"Residential electricity prices including taxes"

Emphasized the important part.

I find these kind of comparisons not helpful, as any country can go from most expensive to cheapest and vice versa by just adding/dropping taxes. And Germany has granted huge tax discounts on energy to its industry, whereas normal citizens like me literally pay the bill.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Why? Because they were tricked into doing so by the Soviet agent Gerhard Schröder, the chancellor before Angela Merkel. That's why.

Strong words. It's not as if Shröder was cozying up to Putin for all the time he was the chancellor, signed Nord Stream 2 into law on his very last days in office, leaving Merkel holding the Russian gas baby, or ended up walking straight from being Chancellor of Germany to being on the seat of trustees in a few of the more major russian gas companies.

Oh wait. He did all that.

Neither amusing nor unexpected his name was once again brought to my attention when Putin invaded Ukraine and can you guess who in Germany stood up to defend the poor russians invaders from the ire of the US, UK and EU?

Yeah, I'm actually surprised that just from what was publicly known about Shröder, the man wasn't hit with some form of formal charge of acting as an agent for a foreign power. If anything he was even more obvious about sucking Putin off at every opportunity than Trump was.

 

[Cloudgazer]

"Residential electricity prices including taxes"

Emphasized the important part.

I find these kind of comparisons not helpful, as any country can go from most expensive to cheapest and vice versa by just adding/dropping taxes. And Germany has granted huge tax discounts on energy to its industry, whereas normal citizens like me literally pay the bill.

https://www.ehpa.org/wp-content/upl...eat-pumps-in-Europe-report_September-2023.pdf
That may explain why your prices are above Italy's, but it doesn't explain help you with most of the continent.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Say what you will, snake oil is a reusable and near limitless resource.

If we ever manage to harness the energy of con men and grifters...what progress. Can you imagine all the infamous con men on the news just in these ten last years? Locked in dynamos far away from civilization?

 

[Amyd]

"Residential electricity prices including taxes"

Emphasized the important part.

I find these kind of comparisons not helpful, as any country can go from most expensive to cheapest and vice versa by just adding/dropping taxes. And Germany has granted huge tax discounts on energy to its industry, whereas normal citizens like me literally pay the bill.

The comparison is indeed difficult, both because of the taxes and because of other forms of direct subsidies (be it for nuclear in France, but also for instance for renewables in Germany).

Take for instance the EEG tax (which funded the main part of the renewable subsidies) — it was for a long time one of the main factors for the higher prices. 2022 it got eliminated (well, set to 0 - maybe it will make one day a return), and now the subsidies are instead financed by the federal budget instead. The comparatively high price of electricity remains…

It should also be pointed out that a non-insignificant part of the taxes on electricity in Germany is still financing either renewables directly (for instance the offshore tax) or it is partly financing the consequences of migrating to a renewable-based energy grid (for instance parts of the grid tax).

I wish somebody would do an honest comparison across countries of actual costs of electricity, including all the subsidies.

 

[Cloudgazer]

There are interconnects, but they are not very significant. Nowhere as powerful as those between the parts of the synchronous networks. I know if Denmark shuts off the connection to Sweden and closes the powerplants on Zealand, the connection to continental network isnt even enough to power that single island, but it can easily run on Swedish power if necessary, just like the other part of Denmark can easily run on continental power.

Norway alone has more GWs of linkage to the synchronous EU grid than the entire Iberian penisula does. On a percentage basis it is enormously more connected.

There won't be a significant increase in the capacity between France and Spain until 2028 and ironically that increase will be via DC lines, rather than synchronous AC.

 

[poenn]

German here, too. Just to clarify: Solar power installations today are usually done in combination with a house battery, because every kWh your roof produces should be self consumption instead of sold to the grid. The reason is that selling to the grid only gives you <10c/kWh but buying the same amount from the grid costs ~35c/kWh. I understand that other countries may not think about buying expensive batteries when power is very cheap and selling to the grid gives you 1:1. I wish this was the case in DE, but right now it isn’t.

 

[Hagen Stein]

What a rosy article, but then why this poor economic outlook, partly blamed on energy?
https://www.reuters.com/markets/eur...ial-production-slump-further-2024-2024-04-22/

Because the BDI (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie) is an industry lobby organization. Have you ever heard those not complaining?

 

[Hagen Stein]

https://www.ehpa.org/wp-content/upl...eat-pumps-in-Europe-report_September-2023.pdf
That may explain why your prices are above Italy's, but it doesn't explain help you with most of the continent.

There are more costs added than just the VAT.

See the graphic at this site. 1) and 2) are taxes and (state-regulated) fees = 50% of the price.

 

[jerminator]

Why are you pushing this bullshit straight from the fossil fuel disinformation playbook? What's your angle?

The options are "ignorant fool" or "active fossil fuel advocate."

Which is it?

Why not both? Btw, Poland doesn't have any nuclear plants to import from at the moment though there are plans to build some. Going by how fast these go it'll be 20 years to never before it's online.

 

[Amyd]

German here, too. Just to clarify: Solar power installations today are usually done in combination with a house battery, because every kWh your roof produces should be self consumption instead of sold to the grid. The reason is that selling to the grid only gives you <10c/kWh but buying the same amount from the grid costs ~35c/kWh. I understand that other countries may not think about buying expensive batteries when power is very cheap and selling to the grid gives you 1:1. I wish this was the case in DE, but right now it isn’t.

The reason for that is because the profit margins for installers are in the battery storage (to a lesser extent in the inverters). So that's what they try to sell you, even though economically speaking, there is no way that a battery system currently makes sense. No matter how rosy you stack the cards in favor of the battery, in most home usage cases they simply don't manage to amortize themselves anywhere near under 15 to 20 years, which is almost certainly guaranteed to be after the end of their useful life.

Of course, you might have other reasons to use battery storage, i.e., you want to because you want to, or because you can afford to or you hope to achieve autarchy or some kind of backup power in case of grid collapse (expensive and complex to actually get there) and so on. Of course, there are also the cases of the direct subsidies (federal or state) which sometimes are/were linked to getting PV and battery installed together, which have been at times extremely (!) attractive - so much so that one program was gone within a few hours of the online portal being activated.

 

[andygates]

German here, too. Just to clarify: Solar power installations today are usually done in combination with a house battery, because every kWh your roof produces should be self consumption instead of sold to the grid. The reason is that selling to the grid only gives you <10c/kWh but buying the same amount from the grid costs ~35c/kWh. I understand that other countries may not think about buying expensive batteries when power is very cheap and selling to the grid gives you 1:1. I wish this was the case in DE, but right now it isn’t.

In other parts of the world they are opening up to virtual power plants, where home generation contributes as needed. Allow the locals on , you don't need extra capacity, everybody wins.

It's one of those things that comes about with a rate and rule change, so lobby your energy company (or investigate alternatives).

 

[poenn]

Yes, there are other reasons involved for our use of a battery. We ditched oil in favour of a heat pump and also charge an electric car. Battery + heat pump gets us usually through the night without the need to get power from the grid. When the sun comes up again, the battery is charged. In the long run this saves quite some money. In the beginning of Putin’s "special operation" the break-even point was around 7 years. It's a bit different now, but it still was worth it.

 

[Cloudgazer]

There are more costs added than just the VAT.

See the graphic at this site. 1) and 2) are taxes and (state-regulated) fees = 50% of the price.

You get that network fees apply everywhere right? Or did you think that outside germany electricity moves from powerplant to the home by magic? The fact that network fees are set by a regulator doesn't make them a tax.\

Even aside from the transmission network itself you're paying for stability of price - otherwise you end up with the situation that a few unfortunates had in Texas when they found to their cost that wholesale costs are not always cheaper than retail.

 

[bjn]

"Residential electricity prices including taxes"

Emphasized the important part.

I find these kind of comparisons not helpful, as any country can go from most expensive to cheapest and vice versa by just adding/dropping taxes. And Germany has granted huge tax discounts on energy to its industry, whereas normal citizens like me literally pay the bill.

And subsidies. France subsidies the hell out of it's nuclear electricity. EDF was recently renationalised just before it was going to go bankrupt because what it could charge for electricity was way less than what it cost them.

I've got no problems with either subsidies or taxes, provided there are sensible reasons for them. Nuclear generation being subsidised 'just because' is not one.

 

[hubbahubhub]

Might as well use all we have.

I am very excited about the new tandem cells.

"The breakthrough is adding a layer of perovskite, another semiconductor, on top of the silicon layer. This captures blue light from the visible spectrum, while the silicon captures red light, boosting the total light captured overall. With more energy absorbed per cell, the cost of solar electricity is even cheaper, and deployment can proceed faster to help keep global heating under control."

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...r-cell-innovations-break-key-energy-threshold

 

[numerobis]

"Residential electricity prices including taxes"

Emphasized the important part.

I find these kind of comparisons not helpful, as any country can go from most expensive to cheapest and vice versa by just adding/dropping taxes. And Germany has granted huge tax discounts on energy to its industry, whereas normal citizens like me literally pay the bill.

The important part is the residential rates. Different jurisdictions set the prices quite differently. It’s not a market rate where people pay basically the producer cost plus a profit margin, it’s heavily regulated. So you can have places decide residential rates are way more expensive than the cost, and other places where it’s heavily subsidized.

Thinking you can look at residential rates and learn something about the cost bases of those grids is just a fool’s errand.

 

[maddanio]

I was about to say this about a prior comment on "we still don't know what to do with the waste" in the nuclear context. That is pretty much the same story in every form of energy generation and its associated wastes. It is not as if coal slag or recycling wind turbines/solar panels, or the CO2 & NOx/SOx pollutants from gas firing, or the CO2 & methane from hydel are all solved issues. None are.

are you seriously comparing old wind turbines to nuclear waste? I am not expert, but I am pretty sure old wind turbines are much easier to recycle than nuclear waste

 

[sirflashback]

Not sure what these numbers mean. According to Wikipedia consumed energy in Germany was 76 percent fossil in 2023 (including a lot of lignite which is amongst the dirtiest coals). Also to note, over the years Germany has imported more and more energy from France (biggest nuclear park) to compensate for the closure of their own nuclear plants so in a way they have just outsourced their nuclear. And last, electricity prices in Germany are amongst the most expensive in Europe. All this sounds a little less shiny than the article?

You got to be careful how you define energy. When talking about ALL energy, including for example Gas based heating solutions this might be true. Talking about electricity load on the other hand, Germany had 60% renewable energy share. Where to find the best sources? This way: https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year

Also German spot market price is pretty average (altough they tend to add a lot of taxes): https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_average_map/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year

On Import/Export: This is just a tiny part of the Germany electricity generation/load.

PS: Great slidedeck on one year without any nuclear power (German only, sorry): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/Ein_Jahr_ohne_Kernkraftwerke.pdf

 

[flipside]

Not really understanding you. Are you claiming that if German politicians were as smart as Finnish politicians, they would have found a way to market a permanent disposal plan to the public?

Fun fact: Bavaria, ruled by conservatives since WW2 and staunch proponents of nuclear, have gone out of their way (including making up science) to prevent storage anywhere near Bavaria…

Anyway as I see it, in hindsight it would have been reasonable to let the 2 or 3 most recently built (1988/89) reactors run a few years longer. However, this probably just would have delayed expansion of renewables, because there was no pressing need. This would have caused the same altercation at a later point in time, as new reactors would never have been politically and financially feasible. Now its just conservative propaganda. Unless there is a gamechanger like affordable smaller reactors, nuclear is just no alternative at the moment.

 

[LizandreBZH]

One point not adressed by the article in renewables intermittency. While Germany on average can cover much of its need by renewables, they do fall quite short on less windy days for example. Then they rely on imports from other countries ... skewing pricing all over Europe in the process.

The German model only works because it can import vast amounts of power from their neighbors when they need, and then dump "waste energy" on sunny/windy days. That system will only work when only one country is doing it. If rest of Europe did the same, it would go quite badly.
On calm / cloudy days prices spike dramatically across Northern Europe because Germany gobles up every Watt it can gets its hands on. And due to the pricing model in Europe, countries that have a suitable base load all year around (and thus should enjoy relative steady prices), instead experience prices jumping up and down like crazy ... with no apparent cause. Regular consumers in neighboring countries are basically paying the price for Germanys energy model.

This is further "enhanced" by Germany having one singular price for electricy across the entire country. Its is one price zone. This has the effect of causing producers to shut down production on especially windy days. The German grid cant handle the production and there is no way to funnel all the power from Norther Germany (where most of the wind power is generated) to the south. This turns into negative prices and producers are paid/incentiviced to temporarily shut down turbines. So while Germany could power itself by raw production numbers, in practice they cant due to limitations in the grid and price model.
So, when Germany should export power at low prices to their neighbors, to make up for the high prices caused by imports on calm days ... they just dont do that. They just dont do their part on supposed mutual exchange. Instead consumers in neighboring countries get high prices when Germany needs power and regular prices when they dont ... instead of the promissed low prices on windy days.

The net effect of this is that exchange cables between countries are hugely unpopular amongst citizens in other countries. Those cables provides cheap power to Germany and delivers high prices back to local consumers. Its very unlikely that new ones will be built and when the old ones expire ... its a difficult question whether they will be renewed unless Germany (and Europe in general) fixed this imbalance more fairly.

The German model is not sustainable and should not and cannot be copied by others.

The downvotes are stupid.

It is indeed a very important point, that led to Portugal and Spain to exit the European energy market and its (half baked) reform.

And plays its part in anti European sentiment across Europe.

 

[Nathi]

Not sure what these numbers mean. According to Wikipedia consumed energy in Germany was 76 percent fossil in 2023 (including a lot of lignite which is amongst the dirtiest coals). Also to note, over the years Germany has imported more and more energy from France (biggest nuclear park) to compensate for the closure of their own nuclear plants so in a way they have just outsourced their nuclear. And last, electricity prices in Germany are amongst the most expensive in Europe. All this sounds a little less shiny than the article?

I couldn’t find the article on Wikipedia - still I though I should forward the source, which I can’t send (try googling „Germany energy sources 2023“ and look through the first link that pops up. Should have „destastis“ in it‘s name)


You can clearly see that the amount of renewable energy used last year amounted to 52.0%. Non-renewables in total only amounted to 43.5%. With about 4.5% of the used energy coming from other energy sources. Of course it’s still not a perfect score, but way better than the numbers you stated.

 

[jwbaker]

This topic is such a litmus test for whether a person is a moron or not. Just look at the graph! Fission had 50 years of opportunities to kill coal and it failed. Solar and wind demonstrably did kill coal. Yet the fission bros will still post 500+ comments here, because nerds are addicted to the feeling that they alone know the right answer that everyone else is overlooking. I, for one, cannot wait for this era of discourse to end.

 

[metarugia]

After reading through this comment thread I need a kurzgesagt video to explain power distribution and growth in Europe.

 

[Amyd]

This topic is such a litmus test for whether a person is a moron or not. Just look at the graph! Fission had 50 years of opportunities to kill coal and it failed. Solar and wind demonstrably did kill coal. Yet the fission bros will still post 500+ comments here, because nerds are addicted to the feeling that they alone know the right answer that everyone else is overlooking. I, for one, cannot wait for this era of discourse to end.

The point of the article, and the reality on the ground, is that coal is still alive and still doing quite well (unfortunately).

 

[almost smart]

We have one of the more uneducated and dogmatic governments in power but the real steps towards a nuclear exit started with Merkel, not with them. And shutting down nuclear infrastructure / firing it back up is not something that can be done on a whim, especially with the wheels of a ramp-down already in motion.

What would have been interesting to mention in the article is how after literal decades of Energiewende, coal is alive and kicking and we have a carbon intensity for electricity generation on par with Vietnam and higher than the US as well as a slowly forming trend of falling industrial output.

 

[Maury Markowitz]

And like everyone else (in the west at least) France has not been able to build replacements on a reasonable time or budget.

Second-system effect.

In the 1970s nuclear was starting to face much stronger competition from the improved economics of other sources, especially natural gas but also coal. The solution was to redesign the systems to be cheaper to operate. Lots of effort into things like reducing the number of pumps and valves so maintanance load goes down. To do so, other aspects of the design get more complex. The trade-off was supposed to be win-win, but as we have seen in every single build in the west, this simply hasn't been the case in practice. The larger and more sturdy pressure vessel and container has been an issue in every build, for instance, which was introduced to reduce the design load of secondary safety systems.

A contributing factor is that the rest of the market hasn't stood still. The money flowing into nuclear was almost perfectly timed to run directly into the 1970s flat-lining of demand, which ended construction overnight. In the 40 years that followed, wind and PV continued to improve to become the actual competition. Currently, PV on a one-axis tracker in the US is anywhere from 80 cents/W to 1.20, wind is around 1 to 1.50, natgas is 85 to 1.25. Nuclear, absolute best-case, is around 6.00, but actual runs to $12. This has pushed nuclear into an economic niche.

As is the case for everything, it's always about the money, and the investment dollars would rather flow to some hot-new PV developer than old-skool Westinghouse. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is, and here we are.

 

[Maury Markowitz]

most of the overruns on these three are being paid (or sneakily offset one way or another) by the French government.

The government debt in France due to nuclear is more than the combined value of all government companies put together. In other words, they could sell absolutely everything they own, all their companies, all the land, all the buildsings, and would still be tens of billions in debt.

It was not that long ago that the republic was manning the barricades in the streets over possible changes to the retirement system. The debt load of France's nuclear program would have funded the possible savings of all of those proposed changes for years. I cannot imagine this state of affairs can continue for much longer.

Last time I ran the numbers, all energy usage (not just electricity) in the USA could be readily produced just by putting solar panel canopies over existing parking lots. Ignore time-of-use and transmission for the moment. This is just an example for scale of the opportunity.

The number you are looking for is 7%.

That is, if you cover 7% of the USA's roofs and parking lots, you will generate all of the yearly primary energy (all of it, electricity, natgas, oil, everything)) using conventional PV technology.

To put this in perspective, large (mall, etc) parking lots account for 2 to 5% of the urban landscape, so the total area needed is not very large in the grand scheme of things.

 

[numerobis]

Second-system effect.

In the 1970s nuclear was starting to face much stronger competition from the improved economics of other sources, especially natural gas but also coal. The solution was to redesign the systems to be cheaper to operate. Lots of effort into things like reducing the number of pumps and valves so maintanance load goes down. To do so, other aspects of the design get more complex. The trade-off was supposed to be win-win, but as we have seen in every single build in the west, this simply hasn't been the case in practice. The larger and more sturdy pressure vessel and container has been an issue in every build, for instance, which was introduced to reduce the design load of secondary safety systems.

A contributing factor is that the rest of the market hasn't stood still. The money flowing into nuclear was almost perfectly timed to run directly into the 1970s flat-lining of demand, which ended construction overnight. In the 40 years that followed, wind and PV continued to improve to become the actual competition. Currently, PV on a one-axis tracker in the US is anywhere from 80 cents/W to 1.20, wind is around 1 to 1.50, natgas is 85 to 1.25. Nuclear, absolute best-case, is around 6.00, but actual runs to $12. This has pushed nuclear into an economic niche.

As is the case for everything, it's always about the money, and the investment dollars would rather flow to some hot-new PV developer than old-skool Westinghouse. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is, and here we are.

The larger, higher pressure and hotter systems were also supposed to improve efficiency, leading to higher energy density -- which as we all know is the most important metric -- along with that minor secondary thing, lower operating cost.

Even with coal we saw big cost overruns on the latest supercritical plants, before the US stopped building them entirely. China persevered and got ultra-super-critical plants to work out.

 

[gijames1225]

I used to be very pro-nuclear, but I must admit that nuclear is dead. Sure it's not as dangerous as the anti-science hippies claim, but it is becoming increasingly so as it slips more and more into the private sector's hands and climate change rears its head. We still don't really know what to do with all the waste. But really the nail in the coffin is that renewables are just so much cheaper and easier that it doesn't really make sense anymore to build more nuclear. Should nuclear research continue ? Absolutely. Should we close perfectly functional power plants ? Probably not, especially if it is to replace them with non-renewables. Might as well use all we have.

I'd just say that the reason's you give for nuclear not being viable are largely self-inflicted and could be resolved if nuclear wasn't the awkward step child of energy production (favored and disfavored by all the wrong people).