Nukes and geothermal simply cost more than solar and wind: nukes, many, many times more. Spending a billion dollars gets you N GW of solar or wind, and N/M, M>>1, of others. Generally, if you need a steam turbine to keep working, you will trail behind anything with zero opex.
Hydrogen has a plausible place in long-term (i.e. strategic) underground storage, in steel refining and other manufacturing processes, and (as LH2) in the future direction of aviation. It might have other roles, such as an intermediate form when using ammonia. Trying to force it where it is a bad fit adds noise.
They only cost more because of "environmentalists" fighting both new reactors, fuel element transport and waste storage tooth and nail in a way they don't fight coal ash ponds or heavy metal tailing lakes...
(The average lifecycle cost of nuclear power at scale in France - where plants were built before anti-nuclear hysteria - is about 7 cents per kWh, same-ish as the cost of solar or wind fleet, and with fewer intermittency problems. Solar might be cheaper in Hawaii and California, but most places are not blessed with 3,000 hours of sunshine a year.)
Please do not try to resurrect old falsehoods.
Specially now where you have Germany who spend lots on renewables using many 100s of billions to buffer the impacts of their policies. For that price they could have just transformed to nuclear.
Germany could literally have spent the same amount of money over the last 20 and next 5 years and have done what France did in the 70/80s and they would be almost 100% green by now. But nuclear is expensive of course.
And of course those reactors would work for the next 80-100 years, but I guess its much better to rebuild wind turbines 4 times over during that time.
> in steel refining
Far better to use the technology the Boston Metal uses.
> in the future direction of aviation
Questionable. Either use batteries or just go with full synfuels.
Germany would today be in a much worse position if they had spent what they did on renewables on upgrading their ramshackle old nuke contraptions instead. France, notably, imported power through summer.
No there isn't actually. The French pay high taxes because of their social services.
If you actually inform yourself you would know that the cost of the nuclear fleet went on the books of the utility, not the French state and has been paid down by the utility for 40+ years now DESPITE the very low energy prices.
> Germany would today be in a much worse position if they had spent what they did on renewables on upgrading their ramshackle old nuke contraptions instead.
Germany was actually one of the best operates of nuclear power. Their reactor had amazing uptime.
> France, notably, imported power through summer.
And the reason is that the Anti-nuclear idiots who were in power in the French state for the last 30 years took cheap green energy for granted and instead of doing the needed maintenance, they forced the utility to invest in solar and support fossil fuel (yes really).
And in fact in 2015 the French state literally basically forced threw a law to turn off large parts of the nuclear fleet in 2025. This lead to even more maintenance not being done.
This is a case of the French state shooting itself in the foot and taking for granted what their fathers gave to them and them treating the fleet like shit and just believing the magical pixies of renewables would reliably produce 10s of GW of power for them within a few years.
Germany is literally spending up to a 500 billion $ on a plan to mitigate all the issues with their energy policy, for that they could literally have built a nuclear fleet 2x the size they needed to be 100% green on nuclear.
We can’t plan our grids or judge the costs according to not just best, but even average scenarios. We have to plan once-in-decades anomalies, the long tail. Non-dispatchable energy sources get exponentially more expensive once you start doing that.
In the future we will need to build out storage. Before there is enough renewable generation to charge storage, building it would be foolish. After, we will need storage, and build it.
And, we will always need liquid fuel. As cost for renewables continues exponentially downward, ammonia synthesized at solar farms in the tropics will undercut NG. In the meantime, shortfalls will be filled by burning an ever-decreasing amount of NG.
We will need a hell of a lot of electric ammonia synthesis in coming decades.
If the storage will need to be built out, then your argument about costs is disingenuous in the world without fossils, because those costs are currently masked by fossil generation.
There is not a single reactor on this list with an operation factor (proportion of hours delivering any energy) over 85%.
Storage, backup, and overprovision are part of any system. 24/7/365 nuclear is a myth.
Once you acknowledge that reality it becomes a calculation of total costs vs. total emissions abated. VRE is about 5x as effective by this metric without even using any strategy other than minor overprovision, existing w2e/hydro, and fossil fuel methane backup, because generating even the mythical 100% green energy starting in 20 years is far worse than generating >80% green energy starting in 2 years.
Even if the long term plan is all nuclear (this doesn't work with commercial technology, there's not enough U235) it's still optimal to max out the VRE pipeline first. The VRE will pay back before your nuclear reactor is done just by the money saved on coal and gas.
It's the time cost. Nuclear takes far too long; geothermal merely takes too long. Same with fancy long-distance HV transmission proposals.
Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.
And yet nuclear is the only tech that has proven to decarbonize a major industrial economy within just a few decades. But of course it takes to long.
When in reality it has not been proven that anybody has ever used solar and wind to de-carbonize a major economy. But somehow everybody knows that it is 'fast'.
Germany could have literally gone to 100% nuclear within the last 20 years and it would likely have cost them 250 billion $ or less. Reliable energy for 100 years. Almost no cost for the grid because you can just build nuclear plants next to coal plants.
> Can it be built and commissioned in a year? Do it.
What is this obsession with short term thinking? When you build major long term infrastructure like trains tunnels, you simply don't do it in a year.
If France could do something in the 70/80s, finishing nuclear reactors multiple reactors every year. Germany could have done the same and they would be done by now.
Also it didn't decarbonize france's economy. It partially decarbonized its electricity, this is well under half of the goal. Numerous countries have achieved more with wind and hydro, and the list of countries with higher VRE percent than france's nuclear is growing longer by the month.
But the race is, at base, to displace atmospheric carbon release. So displacing more, faster is the measure of merit.
