it's a way to get infrastructure built up. the tax dollars pay for bootstrapping of the ecosystem. it's actually smart in principle if you think about it, but obviously there's room for abuse and outright fraud.
Exactly. Sadly, it gets overlooked how much subsidies nuclear and even oil+gas have received over the years.
Nuclear energy wouldn't even be a thing without heavy govt subsidies. And it keeps needing subsidies. No nuclear plant is economical without subsidies. (The operators admit this themselves.) In contrast, the solar and wind industry is eventually carrying itself without subsidies. In many parts of the world that's already the case since tech and market have matured.
The total cost of the French nuclear program since the beginning was estimated at 228 billion euros at 2012 prices, including both research and construction costs.
By that time Germany cumulatively poured around a trilling euros into the green energy and still had coal power plants and 2x the CO2 per capita compared to France.
As of 2026, in Germany 22.5% of electricity still comes from coal and CO2 per capita is still 1.7x of France.
The hard numbers so far are extremely favorable towards nuclear. Roughly speaking you get 1.7x better results at a 1/4 of the cost.
I'd say you are comparing different things in different eras. When France built the majority of its nuclear plants, 70s-90s, Germany didn't do anything renewable to speak of but sunk billions into the dying coal industry. Unions and other worker movements put lots of pressure on policy makers to keep subsidizing coal long after it was remotely meaningful to do so, mainly to avoid coal workers getting unemployed and whole regions dying out. Would have been cheaper to just give all those workers a sizeable pension and kick-start other tech, nuclear or not.
When Germany started serious bets on wind and solar, after 2000, France didn't really add much nuclear anymore.
So, the comparison you are making just doesn't work well, no matter if one likes nuclear or not.
Well if France could build reactors in the 70s-90s, then Germany could have done it in 2000s, right? It's not an alien technology.
Instead they chose to pour money into wind and solar and ended up with:
* higher CO2 emissions
* higher consumer electricity prices
* all that for much higher implementation cost
The gap is massive. I think it's directly comparable: these are two neighboring EU countries, comparable in size, population and GDP. They made different choices which led to significantly different outcomes.
