I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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In Europe I think it's mostly because of fear and fearmongering, for example by conservative groups such as greenpeace. (1)
They argue from an emotive point of view: nuclear energy feels unnatural, scary, industrial. Gas power generation on the other hand is the same old familiar technology, the enemy we know, with externalities we all seem to accept already (despite them being known to be worse for all).
Modern day lysenkoism, in essence.
It is also massively uneconomical. Even with existing subsidies, like free insurance and long term storage, plant operators don't want to keep going.
Modern day nuclear advocates are like the Japanese soldiers in the 70s refusing to admit the war was lost decades ago.
Tbh I'd still rather have something economically unviable funded by my taxes than pumping CO2 into the air. And it's not really that much of an either or thing with renewables, both can/should be done but the important thing is to stop subsidizing fossil fuels (which are to this day highly subsidised which makes the comparison even worse)
With the same amount of money you can build so much more renewable generation and storage than nuclear.
This also assumes the same pot of money is being used for all kinds of energy generation, which is not always the case because bureaucracy. Also also pretty much all renewables are intermittent besides hydro which is not available everywhere. It might be more expensive, but both having diverse energy sources and baseline power is good for the grid. Wind and solar also do not provide any grid Inertia,, which is important for maintain frequency. I wanna say it was Ireland (feel free to check where) that actually had too few conventional generators and too much wind, and they had to build basically just a massive flywheel to regulate their grid
The worlds production of storage isn't even sufficient to power germany for a week. Hence why germany is heavily dependent on gas. Mostly US liquified natural gas, and russian pipeline gas.
To me, it's a surprising statement that, for the same amount of money, one can buy something that doesn't exist. 🤔
I am not arguing that nuclear should have been phased when it was, as that resulted in more coal and gas, but that clinging to it now is a mistake.
Building a new nuclear power plant in Germany would take a decade if things went well. Until then grid battery storage can mature and demand adjustment projects can be rolled out. It's probably also easier to convince germans to accept pumped hydro where they live over nuclear.
Sadly, others have argued so and still are. Here in Belgium the Green party is still trying to close existing, running nuclear power generation. In favour of building new subsidised "emergency" gas generation 🙄
In my experience, people tend to severily under estimate the size of the storage problem. To power germany for a week it takes about 7TWh. There's around 0.1TWh of storage installed in the whole of Europe.
Why would we need to store energy for more than an day? We only need to smooth out the difference between supply and demand.
The mayor advantage of the European grid is the disconnectedness over long distances. There are always enough places where the sun shines or the wind blows.
I'd say the disconnectedness cross-border is a disadvantage as the grid already is saturated (1). It can be windy in poland, the generated power can't make it to france.
7 days is an understatement if going solar + wind + storage is the plan. Germany has longer periods of no sun and no wind on record.