89
In Europe, lobbyists are using soaring fuel prices to make the case for more dirty energy
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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In the current European legislative environment yes. We lack common certification rules, standardized procurement and security standards that make sense. Nuclear in Europe is double the time to build and double the cost of nuclear in Japan. This was not always the case. France was able to decarbonized faster than any other big country in the world thanks to the rapid deployment of his fleet. If we fix that, new nuclear in Europe makes sense. We currently lack the technology and the industrial capacity to not be dependent on China for solar, wind and batteries. Nuclear provide energy when you need it, stabilize the grid and ultimately reduce the price of energy (like you see in Finland). The higher the share of renewable in the European grid, the higher the amount of batteries needed. In general one could argue that the best grid mix for lowering external dependencies and costs is 10% to 20% nuclear, and the rest hydro, solar, wind and batteries. In the north of Europe wind is a great resource, but in the most industrialized part of the south (Italian padana plain) the wind potential is very low, as the solar potential in winter when the fog would cover everything. The amount of connections to make a renewable only grid work on the European level are not trivial nor cheap, and we should do anything we can to promote and regulatory environment where the best tool for the job can be deployed.
Is there sufficient uranium mining in the EU? If not then nuclear doesn't make the EU energy-independent.
cheap uranium can be bought from Canada and Kazakhstan. In Europe there are big reserves in Ukraine. But uranium can also be extracted from water. Getting uranium from the ocean is 3 to 5 times more expensive. But uranium is a minimal part of the cost of nuclear energy. So if we get uranium from the ocean, energy price will raise by 10% to 15%. On fossil fuel power plant the actual fuel is most of the cost of the energy. Furthermore you can buy uranium years in advance, making it much easier to prevent jump in market prices.
I don't know, somehow that doesn't sound to me more independent than buying a shit ton of solar from China which gives 2 decades of runway to develop domestic production for replacement. Solar + sodium-ion which os already in production and cheaper than Li-Ion in China.
I don't mind nuclear btw.
I mean the industrial barriers to developing new nuclear energy are (AFAICT) similar to the industrial barriers to developing the production and Euro-sovereign supply chain for new battery solar and wind generation. Happy to be shown differently if you can point to me some differences that would have nuclear development require fewer physical resources, time or money.
I think some development in Small Modular Reactor tech is promising. Any in-progress or in-operation nuclear should stay the course. But if there was one technology we could choose to either ride fully into or vastly increase development alongside nuclear and other energy sources, the drastic cut in costs for renewables with battery storage seem to me like the silver bullet to the climate crisis everyone was waiting for, we just need our governments to pursue it NOW. In Italy's particular case, tidal energy seems very suitable due to its massive coast relative to land size.
The main problem is that in europe there is no single regulatory body for the certification of nuclear reactor. That means that a nuclear reactor certified for france needs to be certified again for UK, Poland or Czechia. The requirements for nuclear are much higher then a solar power plant. Each single material and part needs to be certified and the entire production is tracked (material traceability, QA testing, chain of custody). A valve in a nuclear power plant cost 100 times more then the same valve in a coal plant. There are very few companies that deal with this level of paperwork required, this means often you need to create new production lines. Regulation in nuclear is not outcome oriented, but process oriented. So you do not have incentive to make everything more efficient: you do not care about the end result, you care about every single steps in the process. This make everything much longer and expensive. Post Fukushima raised a lot the cost of all design made before as new requirements caused to modify previous plants. This is one of the main reasons for the delay in nuclear deploy in the last 20 years.
So you're arguing that the cost and regulation barriers are higher than renewable development. Are those increased costs proportional to the benefit to the higher baseload, and would an equivalent baseload not be able to be met through battery storage?