Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years. The only way out is to stop buying power from its enemies | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/europe-3-energy-shocks-in-4-years-what-to-do-next/
Europe has survived 3 energy shocks in 4 years. The only way out is to stop buying power from its enemies | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2026/03/25/europe-3-energy-shocks-in-4-years-what-to-do-next/
So you advocate for coal, gas and oil until we can be 100% reliant on renewables?
There’s no option. Transitioning to nuclear will keep you burning stuff for 10-15 years whilst they’re built. Even SMRs will be 5-10. Renewables come online with a much smoother transition curve. You reduce burning stuff sooner, and we need whatever is quickest.
Still need batteries big enough to power global shipping etc. Nuclear can do that, even though building reactors takes time
It can, and I’m not anti-nuclear for all use cases. I just don’t think it stops us burning stuff soon enough.
No perfect solution, sadly. We’re also very late to start reducing emissions. And humanity doesn’t seem to be able to get their shit together and actually do something about it any time soon
That’s a bad faith interpretation of the above comment. We already can be 100% reliant on renewables. Nuclear is so clownishly expensive that it’s far cheaper to provide baseload power via solar, wind, batteries, and other energy storage mechanisms.
Well what will you use for power generation before we have enough renewable energy? You say it yourself: “can” be reliant. Yes but we are not, so what’s the way forward? Nuclear til we have enough renewables, or you know, my question : shall we burn coal up til then?
And nuclear energy is less expensive than coal, oil and gas IMO.
What are you on about? We don’t have the nuclear we’re talking about. This is about future plant construction. And new renewable capacity can be deployed in a fraction of the time that nuclear can.
France have upped their production massively, you don’t always need to build a whole new nuclear central to augment production.
France went all in on nuclear in the 80s and 90s. They’re upping their production now to replace their aging stations that are needing to be decommissioned. Their power generation has been 90+% nuclear for a looong time. That was a good time to do it. Renewables weren’t practical like today.
You seem to think that renewables only help when we have enough for 100%, but that’s not true. Take the UK for example. It currently has about 32GW of installed capacity. Of course the wind doesn’t always blow, but over the last year it generated about 10.5GW on average. That’s all fossil fuels not being burnt. CO2 not being emitted. Today.
For comparison: That’s 6-10 nuclear reactors worth. Modern ones. And it’s mainly happened in the time period that the UK has been building one 3.2GW nuclear site (2 reactors) that had an opening date of 2025. If they’d not invested in wind, and just gone nuclear, starting 10 or so reactors around the country, we’d have been burning fossil fuels at full rate for the last 15 years and only now be able to switch off coal and a bunch of gas. Going from 6-700g of CO2 per kWh to todays 125g.
This image wouldn’t be a transition, it would be a sharp step to the left at the end. (From here)
Unfortunately that nuclear site is delayed 5 years to 2030. So we’d still be burning fossil fuels. No reduction. By that time it’s planned that 50GW of wind will be installed, so about 15-16 GW on average. Another 4-5 reactors worth, but that doesn’t stop the reductions we have today.
You forget that France is also exporting power to countries who have not yet got onto the renewables bandwagon, all your data is worthless without that in mind.
And thank you for not putting words in my mouth again. Ask if I think this or that instead of just going with some gut feeling about what you think I do in fact think. I usually answer!
This is the correct answer. Nuclear is not a perfect energy source, but it fills one big gap that we currently have with the renewable energy sources.
I would also say that gas can be an ok alternative in some situations. For example as replacement of a coal power plant if it is built together with solar and/or wind power. The gas power plant can increase the power when the renewables does not produce energy and be turned off during sunny or windy days.
What exactly is the big gap? Are you going to mention baseload, a concept that’s been obsolete for a decade? The baseload power demand, according to the according to its actual definition, is zero on many grids. Solar and wind produce energy Joule-for-Joule far cheaper than fission. And we have any number of ways of storing that cheap energy. Renewables are the cheapest form of baseload power. It’s not 2010 anymore.
Plus, if we’re talking national security, we’ve seen from the Ukraine conflict that every nuclear plant is a huge geopolitical liability. There have been many near misses and scares relating to Ukraine’s fission plants. Many have had to be shut down due to the risk of being struck. And hell, Iran’s plants are actively being targeted by US and Israeli air strikes. In a big war, your enemy can create an instant chernobyl in your backyard if they want. You can design a reactor to be intrinsically safe, but that doesn’t help if someone drops a ballistic missile on top of it. And yes, if you did this to a nuclear power like the US or Russia, it might provoke a retaliatory strike with actual nuclear bombs. But there are dozens of countries that have nuclear reactors but no nuclear weapons. For them, having nuclear power plants is a huge strategic liability. Far better to have innumerable solar panels and wind turbines scattered across the countryside than one big vulnerable reactor, an Achilles heel that an enemy can target to knock your whole power grid offline.
Solar and wind power are dependent on the weather to generate power, where nuclear power is not. I agree that there are many ideas on how to store the energy from solar and wind power, but how many of them is used on such large scale that it makes a difference on the grid?
Out of topic but do you have any data that shows that the baseload is obsolete? I have a hard time to believe that based on the definition from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/baseload