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Nuclear is even worse than that: The only nuclear plants in Europe that have been built in 10 years or less in recent times are Russian ones, the singular EPR took 18 years. It's not a timescale that is well suited for addressing the immediate climate catastrophe.

(But we need to keep battling on the longer timescale as well of course, so nuclear is still good to build)

It is quite possible to build save nuclear plants in a short time. Swedish Barsebäck and Oskarshamn took 5 years each, finnish Olkiluoto 1 started already after 4 years. In the heavy bureaucratized Germany Unterweser took 6 years from first dig in the ground.

All these are from the 1970's, and now roughly 50 years later, our evolved technology and knowledge of nuclear technology and safety, should make it even faster and safer.

But funny enough it doesn't get faster. I have my suspicions why, but have not formulated my thoughts enough to blog about it.

A lot has to happen before you can break ground building a nuclear power plant. Pure construction time is not a good measure.

Is there an answer for the short term? Last I checked, there are days where the sun doesnt shine and the wind doesnt blow; its going to take a long time to build enough batteries.

With pure logic the short term solution is to build coal plants. They’re cheap, fast and easy to build.

You can use coal as a stopgap while you ramp up nuclear and renewables. This is what China is doing for example

That would be the logical step yes, or never shutting down the nuclear in the first place.

There is no "pure logic" in energy and climate policy, there's tradeoffs and value jugements. You can build coal or use fossil fuels like natural gas if you are willing to do climate harm, but it's obviously not the only solution.

Thats why grid connections matter. When there isn’t sun and wind in germany there’s some sun in spain, some wind in denmark, some nukes in france, some hydro in norway and as last resort - some coal in poland.

Also why smart appliances matter too - you wouldn’t even notice if your car charges 25% slower, house is 1 degree colder/warmer and shower is few minutes shorter…

If society doesn’t exist in 5000 years, who cares who finds it?

That’s like asking us now if we care there were human sacrifices 5000 years ago. Yeah, ok that’s awful but I don’t really care.

Similarly if all society collapses, I do not give a shit if somebody digs hundreds of meters into a cave clearly labeled “do not go here” in pictograms that can be understood by the most rudimentary thinkers, and dies of radiation poisoning.

We used to have GAMES where we watched people get ripped apart by lions, FOR SPORT. When did this BS “we must never potentially maybe damage some random human 5000 years into the future” stuff come from?

So, france is able to store it all in a single warehouse despite being a majority nuclear grid, so volume isnt a concern. Environmentalist policy effectively shut down a plan for long term storage where its stored underground with signs designed to be understood by future civilizations. No, instead we will do this the hard way, where we have to build out 1000x++ the worlds battery capacity because there are no environmental concerns there, makes total sense.

Sure, but there they can't get electricity in the summer when it gets to hot because they don't have enough water to cool the plants.

While nuclear power plants do indeed take more time and money to build they do have the significant advantage of reliably producing their target output come rain or shine. They also tend to last about three times as long as wind turbines (nuclear ~60 years lifetime, wind turbines ~20 years) - that is, they can last that long if no "green" politicos are around to switch them off due to ideological reasons. Nuclear power plants also take up far less space per produced TWh.

The "10.000 year storage of nuclear waste" problem can be solved by using a fast neutron/breeder reactor with which spent fuel can be reworked into new reactor fuel. This has two big advantages in that it makes it possible to use up to 90% of the fissile material as fuel as opposed to less than 10% in conventional reactors) as well as the fact that fast reactors can "burn" the long-lived actinides which are responsible for the long-time storage requirements for conventional spent nuclear fuel. The remaining spent fuel is not only much smaller in volume (~10% of the original spent fuel mass) but also much shorter storage times of around 300 years instead of thousands of years.

Well, the question is, how much does a nuclear powered grid cost vs. a renewable powered one. Price isn't irrelevant. Newest numbers for Hinkeley Point C don't look good. Also, while the weather isn't directly limiting the power output, the plands do require cooling which can be limited by the weather. France already had to limit nuclear production quite severely due to this.

The life time of a wind generator isn't limited to 20 years - it is more practical reasons it isn't prolonged further. While with nuclear plants there is a lot of pressure to keep it working, even if the safety isn't quite up to modern standards.

Interestingly, while breeding reactors can be built, none is operating in the west. France had two of them and stopped using them. It certainly is a delicate technology. Would be interesting to do a more detailled analysis why no one is operating any more. Perhaps it is just the typical stance of ignoring the problem of nuclear waste as long as possible. As it has been done so far.

EPA: The typical life span of a windturbine is 20 years, with routine maintenance required every six months [1]

Renewable Energy Foundation: a new study, The Performance of Wind Farms in the United Kingdom and Denmark [2] shows that the economic life of onshore wind turbines is between 10 and 15 years, not the 20 to 25 years projected by the wind industry itself and used for government projections

Russia, China and India are operating breeder reactors, India and China are in the process of starting more. The French SuperPhenix commercial prototype was shut down on political grounds. The completed FBR in Kalkar (Germany) was never fueled, again on political grounds. From what I can see the reason for the limited deployment of FNR/FBR types is mostly based on political and ideological grounds. The fact that these reactor types can be used to create Plutonium which can be used to create nuclear weapons plays a large role as does the irrational fear of anything 'nuclear' in 'green' circles. The latter is becoming less relevant now that many 'green' politicos have seen the problems their anti-nuclear stance create in their own 'battle' against CO₂. The German 'greens' have not changed their ways yet which has led to the expansion of lignite use and with that lignite mining as well as a further deindustrialisation of Germany for lack of affordable electrical power.

[1] https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=P100IL8K.TXT

[2] https://www.ref.org.uk/attachments/article/280/ref.hughes.19...

Yes, if typical operations license is valid for 20 years, the typical life span is obviously 20 years. Because after that time it is cheaper to build a newer and improved generator than to try to renew the license. That doesn't imply a technical limitation.

You pointing to the maintenance interval is just bad faith argumenting. On that ground, nuclear energy is even more irresponsible, as the power plants get daily maintenance and supervision.

And your claim about the expansion of the lignite usage is another lie. It is on a historical low. It could be lower still, if the previous government hadn't curbed the rollout of renewable energy while accellarating the shutdown of nuclear. Blame them, not the greens.

> Yes, if typical operations license is valid for 20 years, the typical life span is obviously 20 years

You're moving the goal posts. I merely state the facts as published by manufacturers and those from experience in the field (which show the manufacturer data to be highly optimistic).

> You pointing to the maintenance interval is just bad faith argumenting

It is not me pointing out the maintenance interval but the EPA. Is the EPA acting in bad faith?

> And your claim about the expansion of the lignite usage is another lie. It is on a historical low

Germany is re-opening lignite power plants. Tell us how this rhymes with your claim. Also, please, stop using hyperbolic language like 'argumenting in bad faith' and 'another lie', here we deal in facts not feelings. You are clearly ideologically aligned with those who closed the nuclear power plants but do not let ideology cloud your reasoning. Had 'Die Grune' not insisted on closing those nuclear power plants the lignite plants could have remained closed, the wind farm would not need to make place for a lignite mine and power prices in my part of the world (Sweden) would be markedly lower instead of being pushed up due to the fact that the interconnected grid causes prices to be affected by those on the other side of the border.

But you are not telling the truth. Yes, some coal power plants have been reacted, but they are on standby in case we run out of gas or some other major energy shortages. Which hasn't happened. We managed to replace the Russian gas and there was no extremely hard winter. And those plants are slowly getting mothballed again.

Why would you build wind turbines that last fifty years while the technology improves rapidly? The turbines from ten years ago are no longer cost competitive with current models.

> Germany in 2023 installed 1GW of wind power per month

I think you're confusing wind and solar. So far this year, 2.8 GW of wind power and 13.3 GW of solar have been installed.

https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gas...

True, I had it stored in the wrong mental shelve, thanks for the correction.

Can you tell me what is the building cost of something extremely reasonable like 720 GWh of battery storage? That is full output just for single month. As I think shouldering these plants with that level of storage requirement is extremely reasonable.

Why are you making this into wind vs. nuclear again? Both are good and have their use cases.

They can't really coexist for financial reasons.

Do I just have to take your word for it?

Renewables have massive seasonal overproduction. Nuclear only makes financial sense when it runs continuously. It's difficult to reconcile these two.

I don't see the problem. You run nuclear as baseload, and use the excess renewables to do energy intensive tasks, store what you can or sell them to the areas where there is no excess. This problem exists even when nuclear is not in the picture. Having nuclear will hedge you against the occasional underproduction you will experience with renewables, so to me it all sounds completely reasonable.

You force nuclear power plants to sell their energy at a loss for half the year at least. You can of course do that, but good luck finding investors.

Nuclear is already a challenging investment, as the plants are very expensive and only start producing after several years. I think it's reasonable to assume that the state would cover majority of the costs, and consider nuclear as an infrastructure investment, rather than get-rich-quick scheme.

i always find it odd how risk averse the anti-nuclear camp is. I mean if climate change is as bad as they say, it's worth the risk! Without going into the argument itself.

If we need radical changes fast, and nuclear can provide them(!!!) then the fact that there are some risks and that it might be a bit expensive shouldn't matter.

If nuclear was the one option to fight climate change, then by all means we should do it. But the thing is: it isn't and it isn't even a good one.

First of all: you say we need fast changes. That already rules out nuclear. Setting up a new reactor takes like 20 years. We don't have that time. And we wouldn't need one, each major industrial nation would need at least 100 of them, 10 billion each. There is just no way to achieve that. Not even mentioning the other downsides of nuclear.

However renewable buildup is much faster. Germany has build up more than the equivalent of one nuclear plant of solar alone in one year and the buildup speed can be easily accelerated with a fraction of the effort of trying to expand the nuclear capacity.