this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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If you care to google for even one minute you will see that Germany has reduced coal to a historic minimum even while reducing nuclear power.
But that doesn't make as good of a headline to rave over.
And if the conservative former government of 16 years hadn't slowed actual green energy infrastructure as much as they did Germanys energy bill could look way better even.
Nuclear and green energy go hand-in-hand. For a stable and most CO2 efficient power network, nuclear provides the stable base energy, and green provide the changing load on top of it. If grid is only made of green energy, you will always have to have reserve of coal/oil/gas which is started when green production is not enough. You cannot resolve this by increasing the green capacity, because all of them have same dependencies.
Coal is the stupidest one, but gas/oil are not really that much better.
You won't convince me by just making statements as if they were facts.
If this were true you might be correct but it simply is not.
If you increase cheap green capacities enough and build a strong large area grid with some form of energy storage there could easily be enough enough energy in the system to last over any natural fluctuation.
And the nice thing is that if we at some point enter a state where the sum of green energy produced becomes vastly higher than the energy need it becomes less important that different forms of energy storage like water turbines are not very efficient and the storage can be ramped up to make the whole ecosystem even more stable.
This is all perfectly possible and quite possibly cheaper than building new nuclear reactors.
So even if you think nuclear energy is safe and the management of the waste products is not a problem (which are two things I would disagree with, but let's not get into that for now) I still don't see why any country should invest in nuclear energy over green energy.
Robust large scale energy grids and some form of energy storage are things that society wants (and probably needs) anyway, so even just from a strictly economic view green is just the way to go.
World isn't so black and white. Like I said they go hand-in-hand, both should be invested in. And all money should be taken away from fossil.
I live in a country that will this year over produce green energy, which is awesome, because cheap green energy will enable many great things. But the challenge is that our energy price goes between 0 and a lot, because there just isn't any tech to store it. Also green doesn't produce heat, which in here Nordics causes that we need to create it somehow. Nuclear and CHP produce it as side effect.