La Francia taglia gli obiettivi sulle energie rinnovabili ed espande il nucleare con una nuova legge

Watch and learn Europe!

Big mistake. Renewable energy can play a much bigger role in the energy mix than people currently expect.

This is the result of new technologies that make renewables much more reliable even at high volatility peak times.

This isn’t the 60s anymore. We should perhaps try to move on from trying to generate electricity by making hot steam.

We see what works. France has one of the cleanest electricity in the world for years.

 If rveryone was like France we could have 10x greener electricity. 

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly

All with Putins Uranium, prone to shut downs in hot, dry summers, very expensive and barely compatible with the highly dynamic energy markets today.

[Court of Auditors says that EDF fleet maintenance will cost more than 100 billion Euros by 2035](https://energynews.oedigital.com/nuclear-power/2025/11/17/court-of-auditors-says-that-edf-fleet-maintenance-will-cost-more-than-100-billion-euros-by-2035)

Lol. Lots of Frances NPPs are something like 35ish years old atm. They can’t work forever. So they need to be replaced. With the currently planned (!) NPPs they can’t even replace their old ones that are ought to get shut down within the next few years.
Who should finance these old fashioned monsters? If projects develope like Hinkley Point etc, it will take them way longer and will be more expensive than they say now. NPPs will then be 50 years+ in operation. That’s stupid.
I guess it will take some efforts to tell Frances citizens that they will have to beg China for money and Russia for fuel rods.
Just to be able to produce extremely expensive energy that nobody wants to buy then…

I hope France handles it better than we here in Germany. If they have enough money to spare to finance one of the most expensive forms of energy production, they can certainly go for it.

But when your are dealing with nuclear power, there is no room for any errors, incompetence, sloppiness, corruption or excessive austerity. Everything has to be handled perfectly, from the earliest design phases to the decommissioning of the plants many decades later.

Worst case with a wind turbine or solar panel is that it falls someone on the head. Worst case with a nuclear reactor is rendering half a continent permanently uninhabitable.

Same with the storage facilities for the radioactive waste. Here in Germany, our experts and engineers were just not competent enough, our control agencies not meticulous enough… We never found a viable location for a permanent storage facility for highly radioactive waste. Much worse, the one storage facility for medium radioactive waste turned out to be a total disaster. Asse 2 now threatens to contaminate most of the ground water in northern Germany. Billions have to be spent to retrieve the waste from the old salt mine… as soon as robot technology is advanced enough to even try it without sending the workers into their death.

Again. I hope France does much better than we did. We Germans failed so hard that now no one wants to touch nuclear energy anymore with a long stick. Including the energy companies that would have to be forced against their will by the government to try to build a new reactor.

Edit: I’m aware that reddit loves nuclear power and gets saltier than Asse 2 when someone dares to criticize it. But please, think first for a second if anything I wrote is wrong before you downvote out of hurt feelings. Do you really have so much trust in your government and energy companies that you are 100% sure they wont f*ck anything up? Ours here in Germany certainly did.

We need to stop pushing the word renewable and instead start using green or emission-free. Even burning wood to make steam is considered renewable and subsidized. Nuclear is the future.

Besides just cost comparison, different energy sources come with big economic differences.

Fossil fuel is commodity energy. Most is imported. If it is produced locally… surpluses are exported. 

Nuclear or solar generation are “industrial energy,” produced by machines. The main cost is buying the plant equipment. 

China pushed hard for solar because they prefer to build equipment over importing fuel. 

Even for fuel producers… it can make sense to do solar/nuclear and export fuel. You get a new industry, and the old industry can just shift to export. 

Europe’s plan was mostly renewables/solar. The EU, states, and various multiparty efforts engineered the grid system, pricing system and sector to subsidize development of renewable technology and industry. 

This worked OK. European energy consumers paid more, but solar energy cost less every year. 

Then… Just as renewables were becoming economically viable… **China!** China had become the lead producer of panels, batteries and other solar tech. European industry wasn’t efficient enough, or fast enough to win free market contracts. 

So… now we are at a point where you can either import gas from Russia/etc. or you can import solar tech from China. Either way, energy stays an import industry. 

I think France’s emphasis on nuclear energy relates to this. Nuclear energy is their domestic option. Most of the work/purchases is local. Gas and solar represent import options. 

I also think this is being discussed either above or below the “calm reason” line. Ooh, we have a very tentative inadmission of the fact that Europe paid extremely high energy prices for 20 years in order to make renewables viable faster. Then… it turns out that “viable” means China manufactures everything. 

Nuclear is not renewable but doesn’t emit CO2, so its fine

France is already decarbonized in terms of electricity production. What they do is completely up to them. So goes for Spain and Scandinavia. The problematic countries are mostly the ones in central and eastern Europe – especially Germany, Poland and Czechia. Czechia and Poland are planning new nuclear reactors though, I wonder how Germany will fill its Dunkelflaute gaps.

I can already see it that when the water is low and pretty much dried up. That Germany and neighbouring countries have to rout electricity to France in the Summer months.