Classic nuclear in china is pretty cheap, 2.5-3bn/unit. They dont have western problems

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

Baseload power plants are already dead in many grids. Or forced to become peakers.

Flexible dispatchable power plants are having a field day though.

> Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter

Source please. All these ”unimaginable amounts of storage” calculations are usually based on not over producing on a yearly basis.

We also should not let perfect stand in the way of good enough.

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

The bridge in case of germany is coal and gas

And it's still one of the dirtiest grids in europe, while having massive household prices per eurostat, highest in eu, despite of heavy eeg subsidies.

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.

It's not just greens. Decision is jointly made by most parties. Spd is antinuclear. Cdu doesnt care. Afd probably just uses populism

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

Weapons are irrelevant for power generation. No modern classic pwr was used to create weapons- because it's cheaper to have dedicated infra

You know. In US it's yucca mnt, similar to onkalo. Its just not politically pursued as a priority. Recycling is banned

You can get +- same efficiency with classic breeding and purex/pyroprocessing

At this point few care about this topic. It's not like it's easy to make a bomb with classic pwr

With a Uranium-based reactor you need a) a source of enriched Uranium (see proliferation risks), b) inspectors to check that you're not post-processing fuel rods to extract Plutonium.

With Thorium if the operator country wants to extract the U-233 you think "maybe let them, they won't like it".

With classic pwr rods can't be used for weapons because of parasitic isotopes. At best you need to run the reactor in a specific way that would trigger global attention looking at power fluctuations. And still it'll not be easy afterwards. You can buy enriched uranium from others. With th- I'm not sure but don't you need enriched material anyway to kickstart it?