Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.
This is a mischaracterization of what happened. The economics got bad because of regulatory pressures, and regulatory pressures increased because of anti-nuclear sentiment, and …
… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.
The fossil fuel industry quietly funneled money to these groups to discredit nuclear which competes with gas/coal for base load. Solar/wind only partially compete because at times they produce nothing so the grid still needs base load (usually "natural" gas these days).
Thanks for all the extra greenhouse gases, Greenpeace!
this is nonsense. Take german plants - zero subsidies for operation, plants were built mostly by private sector.
In France - no CFD's for existing units, plants were constructed by govt for about 150bn. In comparison Germany spent on EEG subsidies double of that and you can see the result in emissions...
Really? Which private sector built nuclear power plants in East Germany? In West Germany most plants were constructed by state-controlled enterprises and there were no expectation of them to ever reach profitability.
it wasn't fully state controlled enterprises in the west - state was a partial owner. For example PreussenElektra, when it built plants was a publicly traded company and during Grohnde state mostly divested from it. Plants not only reached profitability but were cheapest firm power in german merit order bringing huge profits to the owners
According to Wikipedia, PreussenElektra was a subsidiary of VEBA, a state owned energy company. You have to cite your sources here because I don't want to have to rebut made-up stuff.
I do note that you have changed your argument from "plants were built mostly by private sector" to "it wasn't fully state controlled enterprises in the west". Closer to the truth, but still incorrect.
I stand corrected. VEBA was state owned at that time. On the other hand RWE was 50/50 private-municipality owned in the same period.
Still, no CFDs were given to them. So it's not about state reducing subsidies. Nor was it about environment regulations.
The high costs of recent western projects are more related to depleted supply chain and poor designs of the plants. We'll get a chance soon to observe how Canada and Korea will build in Europe. Both have much better supply chain and both want to build (Czechia- apr and Romania -candu). If both will have the same cost blows as flamanville then it's clearly related to EU itself. If not- then the problem was EDF incompetence specifically here and Westinghouse incompetence in US
As I said, cite your sources. You claim RWE was a public-private partnership "in the same period" but don't even state which period. Your claim about CFDs is a complete non-sequitur as I never claimed that the subsidies were in the form of CFDs.
Subsidized capital mostly. When you go to a private bank and want to borrow billions of money the bank will ask you "what for?" You tell it "nuclear, might generate profit in 25 years" and it will quote you an interest rate. The rate will be insanely high due to the risk. So you borrow the money from the government at a much lower interest rate.
And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.
what has installed capacity to do with price? Check recent chinese solar parks prices and power. Normalize that power with chineze weather capacity factor. Do the same for their nuclear which is roughly 2.5bn/unit
China does expand ren more than nuclear but the reason is not economics but the capacity to scale (as well as inland ban)
430 GW a year on 20% (which it is not, as china has lots of desserts with no clouds) would still be a way bigger number than 110 GW that are planned to be reached in a few years.
Then here I might stand corrected, but it does not change the basic equation nore the invalidation of the claim above, that china is building nuclear like it builds solar and wind. It does not. Not even close.
Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless?
A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?
Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.
Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past.
Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.