Nuclear renaissance in Europe? | FT Energy Source

As countries including France, the UK and Sweden look to pivot back to nuclear power to help them meet net-zero targets, questions remain over safety, radioactive waste and where they’ll find the vast amounts of money and expertise needed to build and manage new reactors.

#nuclear #netzero #energy


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[irwainnornossa]

Nuclear power is good and clean. It can be done right. And we should do it on a massive scale.

[cesarecertosini]

Using wholesale costs instead of the Eurostat average national prices for households and industrial consumers is disingenuous at best. Looking at the real bills (i.e. using Eurostat) France is way cheaper than anti nuclear states like Germany, Italy, Belgium and Denmark whom continuously show the highest prices in Europe. Wholesale prices are only relevant for the day ahead market energy which in France is a very low percentage of the total energy consumed daily.

[davidwalsh]

The interconnectors should have been discussed more. The EUs plan is to trade between countries. Eg irelands plan is to have a lot of wind turbines which will be traded with France who will have a lot of stable nuclear

[Mister.Unknown]

I find people who don't now how to pronounce "Nuclear" hard to trust on . . . you know, nuclear matters.

[tomo]

i'm not sure about building new nuclear plants, but keeping the existing ones so long they are safe to operate should've been a must for germany too. but sadly the populists were louder than the scientist and engineers. as always.

[santaclaus]

If you want nuclear power, you also (and especially these days) have to think about the supply chain. There are not many export countries for uranium, much less than for oil. Like petroleum, uranium is a raw material that Europe and almost the entire rest of the world have to import if they want to use nuclear power. There will be disputes over this raw material, price games, wars...

[mintberrycrunch]

not sure comparing wholesale prices is a good metric of what it costs to produce e- in both France & Germany

[glennnielsen]

Nuclear power as we know it today is extremely expensive to build, but it provides baseload.

[Subaru_]

Renewable or nuclear energy, both? or a future new one..?

[francesco]

Unbelievably misleading and oversimplifying piece

[joaquimbarbosa]

Nuclear power is necessary. There is and will never be necessary ammounts of storage. And I'm not even mentioning the extent you would need to overbuild the RE for the storage to work. Some say nuclear is expensive, but thats only when we make it expensive. If done well, nuclear can be incredibly cheap and fast
We will need a mix of RE+nuclear and some storage so we should esbracejar nuclear and invest in it while also investing into RE

[gastaotaveira]

Sure, Europe needs Nuclear Power. Intermittent Renewables won't be near enough for our energy needs. And due to intermittency they always need despatchable energy sources.
Unfortunately, Europe (especially, France) divested Nuclear for so long that they lost skills.

[glennnielsen]

It is fundamentally legitimate to be nervous when the government makes investment decisions and allocates capital. What is their track record? For France, not so good, if you have to be extremely nice.

[Buran]

French nuclear industry is in bankrupcy. EDF was withdraw from the stock market in Summer of 2022 with an estimated debt beyond 100.000 million € (the same EDF which bought Areva en 2017 on the verge of bankrupcy). The thing is: nuclear energy is not profitable. Hasn't been profitable since the turn of the century and the advances in renewables only made the gap wider. France doesn't even have the money to DISMANTLE the nuclear facilities they need to retire (and they are a lot!), much less to build new ones (specially after the finnancial fiascos of Flamanville and Hinkley Point C).

Macron is set to destroy the economy of France. This is like seing a trainwreck in low speed, and I feel sorry for my french neighbours...

[Houthiandtheblowfish]

Almost like germany is still an occupied country by allies and the peace deal has not been signed with us so energy independence much like sovreignty is out of question much like rationality