Meanwhile Germany just decommissioned its last nuclear reactors. Given the challenges of baseload renewable generation, it's frustrating to watch working infrastructure being dismantled while we're still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
Us is extending licenses to 80y, heck Switzerland extended benzau to 64y. The expiry date talk is pure nonsense. German nuclear had excellent CF and extremely advanced safety, incl double containment
> Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not suitable at all
It is given we're talking about perceptions. I see no evidence Germany's Greens are suddently rational when it comes to modern reactor designs, of which MSRs are one.
By all the doomerism about German and nuclear there is at least Wendelstein 7-x doing frontier work. It's fine to get rid of legacy nuclear if there is a feasible bridge ahead.
Not sure what the point of this comment is. China has its equivalent EAST, France has ITER. Countries can do both fission and fusion research. To me the problem isn't that Germany closed some legacy reactors, but that too little is done into looking into alternative designs.
> Against a background of ongoing protest and low-level sabotage, on the night of January 18, 1982 an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade attack was launched against the unfinished plant. [0]
> On May 8, 2003, Chaïm Nissim, who in 1985 was elected to the Geneva cantonal legislature for the Swiss Green Party,[17] admitted carrying out the attack. He claimed that the weapons were obtained from Carlos the Jackal via the Belgian terrorist organisation Cellules Communistes Combattantes (Communist Combatant Cells).[18][19]
By the time stellarator designs become economical (tens of years in the most optimistic case), you can cover the entire Germany in PV panels. Or even grow an entire new generation of forrest. So far stellarators look just like interesting vaporware. I mean they are irrelevant to any current energy discussion.
The baseload talking point has never made sense but storage doesn't make it make less sense. Baseload here is definitionally power sources that can't economically follow the demand curve. They carry the exact same problem that intermittent power sources like solar do, in that you need dispatchable power sources to augment them so that they can actually meet demand, the only difference is that the cause of this is that generation stays constant while load varies instead of both generation and load varying.
Baseload is not, and has never been, a feature. It's just a drawback that can be handled so long as only some of your power comes from such sources.
Batteries augment base load power sources the exact same way they augment intermittent ones, they take power from them when there is excess and give power back when there isn't making them effectively dispatachable power.
Um, yes it has. When you use solar or wind for baseload, it must be backed up by a spinning reserve. When you calculate the combined CO2 output of both the renewables and the spinning reserve, you learn it is more than just using gas by itself (and often it is more than just using oil or coal). There has never been a renewable power source used for baseload that has reduced CO2 emissions per watt. The math and laws of physics basically prevents it from happening. You want that to change, learn how to purify poly-silica more efficiently. And nobody (and I mean nobody) is even working on that. You don't pay for power, you pay for power you control with a switch. Power you don't control is called an explosion.
Baseload is about supplying demand. It'll not go. And to supply it reliably you need firm power. The 500gw statement contains both overlapping bids and just intentions to "think" about deployment. Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter and deploy even more renewables to charge it. It remains a question how govt will protect investors from cannibalized generation- offshore is already facing problems
The proof is looking at open generation data past winter. Sadly energy charts gives only gwh/day but you can still do some inference about how much fossils were used/how much imported
There's no such thing as baseload power plant. If solar were able to supply the demand with some bess you'd call it baseload. What matters is firm power.
And yes, Germany plans to expand gas plants. It's sad they didn't opt out for BWRs that can modulate faster, at 1%/sec
Now you want a firming nuclear plant? First it needs to be reliable, we can't have a system collapse when 45% is offline like happened in Sweden in October and May this year.
Then it needs to be dispatchable.
Nuclear power when it runs at 100% 24/7 all year around except a tiny maintenance window costs ~18 cents/kWh.
Are we looking at a 50% capacity factor? And not collapsing when 50% are having outages?
So ~60 cents/kWh?
I love how new built nuclear power becomes completely farcial when put into real world constraints.
For generation data, go to https://www.energy-charts.info/index.html?l=en&c=DE , pick any 4 day interval in each month from dec to feb last year. Look how much twh was generated from fossils and imported. That's what you need to replace
I love it when 45% having an simultaneous outage is acceptable for nuclear power but dealing with renewable variability is a dealbreaker.
The logical inconsistencies are amazing.
You do know that a 90% averaged capacity factor and simultaneous outages of 45% doesn’t have to be a disjoint set?
Yes. Way way easier, cheaper and faster using renewables and maybe all storage.
Or are you suggesting that we should stave off renewable implementation, continuing with the current emission, and wait until the 2040s for new built nuclear power to come online?
I suggest do both.
45% in sweden was 2 units going offline? I even doubt that's 45%. And for most part outages were planned. But that's maybe why swedish govt wants to go with smaller bwrx units. This way you can schedule easier annual maintenance for each unit
Just like during the energy crisis Sweden had another 7 month outage. With the worst week of all with the winter peak consumption happening with 2 reactors having outages.
But it is much easier to pretend that the capacity factor over the lifetime applies and then cry about renewables eating their lunch.
Hahahaha if that ever happens. The government seems to like the idea of nuclear power but not politically bearing the costs of tens of billions in handouts.
Now they’ve soon spent four years dallying without any real progress and the next election is coming up in September.
The question you need to answer is:
Why should a home owner with rooftop solar and a home storage buy 18 cents/kWh + backup (you know, 2 out of 6 reactors having outages when needed the most) when their rooftop solar or home storage delivers?
Germany has the most expensive and dirtiest grid in the developed world. They get the majority of their baseload power from other countries, often generated by nuclear or gas. Also, that you think they have 500 GW of anything that generates power is pretty funny. The only thing your comment says is that you don't understand anything about how power is generated or how an electrical grid works. People like you are why we still use so much FFs. You can't solve AGW with accounting tricks.
PS Maybe ask Spain how that renewable baseload generated power is doing for them.
Germany sourced 57% of all power from renewables in the first 9mo of 2025 [1]. They seem to be doing just fine, might be time to update your talking points
Quickly becoming greener. Are you saying that Germany should stop their renewable buildout and keep their current emissions until the 2040s while waiting for new built nuclear power to ”save the day”?
That literally makes no sense at all.
Looking at wholesale prices all of continental Europe is quite similar.
Some countries, like Germany, taxes electricity a lot to promote efficiency.
Not sure what alternative you suggest?
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power. So that’s not an option either.
Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program. The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
It didn't make sense to shut down nuclear before coal/gas for Germany. It should deploy both ren and nuclear, even restarts unless it wants to use gas firming.
Germany's low carbon twh is unchanged since 2015. What changed is it became net importer and demand dropped, hence a lot of coal closed.
Wholesale is irrelevant. Taxes are needed to fund infrastructure. In case of Germany a big chunk is transmission which will be subsidized from 2026 just like eeg already is. Example of why- sudlink, but that's just for redispatching, ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment
France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours into EEG alone in merely 2y.
Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a deal with khnp and Westinghouse
French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most of the debt is from pension system because well, work hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors. Edf debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to ebitda ratio is in normal range.
> ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment
Which has been calcualted by GenCost to add up to ~€10B for Australia. That is less than the subsidies a single reactor needs.
> France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours into EEG alone in merely 2y.
This is very typical of nuclear bros. You can never look forward. The EEG is a backwards looking metric, a ton of extremely expensive solar was added 10-15 years ago which still get paid.
You can look at the historical cost of the EEG system to see it decreasing.
- 2019: €27B
- 2020: €30B
- 2021: €17B
Those payments support 153 GW of infrastructure. Again you do realize as soon as we compare with new built nuclear power, adjusting for capacity factors, it just becomes lunatic to suggest nuclear power?
The question is where we spend our money today. The subsidy needed for renewable deployment in 2025 is 0. As can be seen by the 16 GW built without subsidies.
> The installed capacity of renewable installations not eligible for payments under the EEG was 16.2 GW
That's just equivalent to a few nuclear reactors. Nothing big!
> Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a deal with khnp and Westinghouse
Or they can just let the French folly continue and see the state finances crash when loaning becomes even more expensive.
> French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most of the debt is from pension system because well, work hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors.
It becomes connected when the state subsidizes nuclear power to enormous amounts which could have gone to balance the budget.
> Edf debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to ebitda ratio is in normal range.
I love this sleight of hand. Debt to ebitda is fine, when considering that Hinkley Point C gets a completely insane 17 cents/kWh. And that the state will subsidize the EPR2 program.
EDF is fine if the state takes all the costs. So funny.
Ah yet again a bunch of nuclear hating. It'll be my last reply to you since I don't wanna lose more time here.
GenCost predictions are already failing if you look at the state of current transmission projects in Australia (huge cost increases across the bord, and not just transmission). And for Germany it'll be even harder due to more nimbys (hello sudlink that was protested even by greens at some point) and different weather/generation patterns.
It'll be gradually the same with onshore and even some solar.
Nuclear has advantages beyond CF, like firm generation, less system costs. Even Fraunhofer/bnetza understand this, that's why both are pushing to expand gas to firm renewables(because well, nuclear is out of discussion for em)
French national debt is 3.5 TRILLION, most because of social system. EDF debt is 50bn while debt/ebitda ratio is about 2 (while EON/RWE have a worse ratio) To suggest EDF debt has any meaningful impact here is borderline insane.
HPC CFDs are smaller vs what Germany or UK offers for biomass, or what UK offered for greenvolt, and soon to be in line with what UK will offer for new wind projects in latest AR rounds https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6880d6f8f47ab...
There are some wild numbers there for some tech, HPC looking cheap in comparison
EDF is not subsidized by France, yet. You can consider a one off 9bn nationalization but that's peanuts vs eeg and hardly a subsidy considering debt/ebitda. In fact edf is subject to profit tax called arenh (the one that caused high debt in 2022), soon to be replaced with another profit sharing mechanism. Arenh was mandated by EU so that EDF doesn't erase competition. EDF financials are public and there aren't any mentions about state pouring money except renewables sector. As said, EPR2 will get some subsidies, but make no mistakes, compared to EEG it'll be peanuts.
Mind you, Germany already spent on EEG alone almost 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet (looking at public numbers from court/DE) but it still has worse emissions. In a similar timeframe (messmer) france almost finished the job.
On the other hand, both the praised California and South Australia, leaders in ren deployment, do have both worse emissions than France and higher household prices
It's indeed funny to me how people are so concerned about the costs of nuclear but are just fine with full system costs of renewables that strangely, are not that cheap as predicted by orgs like aemo/csiro in Australia and even more so in other markets.
Trying to predict the future based on it is a backwards looking metric. Your link says that it may increase to €23B by 2029. While the EEG in 2020 was €38B in 2025 euros.
It is already rapidly falling as expensive old contracts fall out.
> Offshore in Germany is already facing challenges like in UK and DK.
Love trying to change the topic to off-shore wind. Pretend that onshore and solar faces the same challenges.
Off-shore wind is right on the cusp of viability. With low infrastructure costs and a comitted customer it is. The Danish and German auctions were "negative bid" styles. The developers had to pay for the privilege to build off-shore wind.
The UK capped the CFD too low as per recent increases in interest rates and material costs. An issue which nuclear power is affected by to an even larger degree.
> It'll be gradually the same with onshore and even some solar.
Of course ignoring that 500 GW storge interconnection queue. But that would be daring to lift your eyes.
> Nuclear has advantages beyond CF, like firm generation, less system costs. Even Fraunhofer/bnetza understand this, that's why both are pushing to expand gas to firm renewables(because well, nuclear is out of discussion for em)
I love this magical nuclear plant that soaks up an entire grid load. In reality all grids with nuclear power has tons of peaking since trying to go above the baseload with nuclear power just becomes stupidity.
That was before zero marginal cost renewables entered the picture. Now nuclear itself are becoming peakers. As evidenced by nuclear power all over Europe being forced out of the markets or having to bid negative.
> French national debt is 3.5 TRILLION, most because of social system. EDF debt is 50bn while debt/ebitda ratio is about 2 (while EON/RWE have a worse ratio) To suggest EDF debt has any meaningful impact here is borderline insane.
I love how adding ~€100-200B from nuclear handouts to build the EDF2 fleet is "trivial. A 2.5 - 5% increase in the already extremely bloated French debt is insignificant! Move along!
> Arenh was mandated by EU so that EDF doesn't erase competition.
Because the entire French fleet was built with state aid. But that you conveniently ignore.
> Mind you, Germany already spent on EEG alone almost 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet (looking at public numbers from court/DE) but it still has worse emissions. In a similar timeframe (messmer) france almost finished the job.
Again looking backwards. You know we live in 2025? What you're telling me is that 2012 solar was expensive and thus required large EEG. Do you understand that we're not building 2012 solar, we're buiding 2025 solar.
Also love the victim complex.
> On the other hand, both the praised California and South Australia, leaders in ren deployment, do have both worse emissions than France and higher household prices
They're not done yet? Are they claiming to be done?
> It's indeed funny to me how people are so concerned about the costs of nuclear but are just fine with full system costs of renewables that strangely, are not that cheap as predicted by orgs like aemo/csiro in Australia and even more so in other markets.
Because these "full system costs" have never been shown to materialize? They are fossil shill and nuclear bro talking points because they can't deal with reality.
We need to 1.5x - 3x our grids to decarbonize society and industry. The extra costs coming from a renewable grid when already having double or triple the grid size are trivial.
Just like you nuclear bros never talk about nuclear unreliability. It is apparently 100% reliable except when it isn't. And then it also needs fossil gas peakers to manage the peak load because load following nuclear power simply becomes stupid.
You also have the issue of trying to force it on the population. Why should a home owner with rooftop solar and a home battery draw electricity from the grid?
Explain to me how you would deploy a nuclear plant in this grid:
To be fair, a lot of nuclear reactors around the world should be shut down just due to age and outdated designs. However they should also be being replaced with modern reactors, which few people have, which makes shutting them down while we are still largely utilizing fossil fuel power and chemical plants really dumb.
