zlacker

>>Capsta+(OP)
What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

>>Ecomme+1f
> Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.

The issue is that nuclear is currently the only reliable base load generation technology that doesn't produce carbon (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable"). The other top technologies either produce carbon (natural gas and coal) or are unreliable (solar and wind).

I actually don't believe nuclear is "the future" because I think renewables + battery storage will be more economical going forward and less politically dicey. But France is currently the envy of the world for their energy generation save for some countries with unique environments that allow for a lot of carbon-free generation (e.g. Norway with hydro and Iceland with geothermal).

>>hn_thr+9h
Why isn’t wind and solar politically dicey? Nuclear is only politically dicey due to ignorance. I’d rather one nuclear plant than having the landscape covered with huge windmills — windmills made out of materials that aren’t recyclable. Solar is even worse. Nuclear doesn’t affect wildlife like wind and solar.

>>briand+ri
I agree that the safety fears and waste disposal issues around nuclear are overwrought, but still: I would much prefer solar and wind farms (even with the downsides you mention) over the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. Even if the probability of something like that is 0.0000000001% or whatever, the consequences are so severe that it just doesn't seem worth it when there's a good-enough alternative. Also consider that nuclear is expensive (both in capex and opex)! The whole "too cheap to meter" nonsense from the 1950s never came to fruition.

I get that opinions differ on this (clearly you have a different take), but that's fine; reasonable people can disagree.

(To be clear, I don't believe solar/wind is the be-all, end-all. Base load generation is still a problem there, and neither source is reliable or consistent in the way that something like nuclear is.)