It's a bit absurd, what you say, like arguing that it's good to stop using a stove in your apartment and just eat food raw, because one of your neighbors already did enough bad because they burned their entire house down while trying to make a bonfire with piles of coal in their yard.

The direct comparison of solar/wind nameplate capacity with nuclear is extremely dishonest. They NEVER reach full capacity even with favorable weather and it's absolutely not comparable to nuclear if you don't have at least a decent amount of storage built alongside.

They are still using coal/gas predominantly (around 70%) so renewables are still peanuts. They are building solar/wind to supplement their other sources, since they can't build anything else fast enough. None of their other sources of electricity generation has gone down since they started investing in renewables. So, it's not replacing anything, and it still technically can't anyway.

In any case, they have 1408GW of installed solar + wind that generated 1836080 GWh (1836 TWh) of energy and they have 61GW of installed nuclear capacity that generated 450850 GWh (450 TWh) of energy. So, their solar & wind installation is 23 times larger but only generates about 4 times the amount of electricity, that isn't even reliable.

It doesn't matter if they hit a speed bump in their nuclear rollout, it doesn't have to be as fast to deploy as renewables because it fundamentally doesn't give you the same things. It is a true replacement for coal, which renewables aren't at this stage.

On this, another funny story that pro nuclear also don't mention: this summer when it was very hot (and electricity demand for AC was high) they had to shut down several reactors because the cooling river would have been over heated too much. People criticize renewable for not being available all the time (which is indeed a problem without storage) but here thankfully solar saved the day by being available when it was needed.

Last thing that people tend to forget when they criticize ecologists views on nuclear: part of many ecologist program is to make it so that we use less energy. Heating and cooling poorly insulated housing is wasteful and stupid. Having everyone having their own transportation mean rather than having collective and energy efficient transportation system or having housing too far from commodities such that people can't walk or bike to them is also wasteful. And AI... Bref, let's fix that then maybe we won't need that much nuclear power in the end.

The real reason is cost. Nuclear power plants produce extremely expensive electricity until they are paid off ~40 years later. For paid off nuclear plants the cost is acceptable as long as they can get paid for nearly all hours of the day, if capacity factors craters then paid-off plants become too expensive.

And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at €0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.

Who wants to lock in energy crisis prices until ~2080 factoring in construction time? The nukebro squad seems to think that is reasonable.

> From the most part this is predatory behavior, where they get to make the profits while not paying the full costs that would be necessary to be a truly equivalent solution (reliable electricity at any time/season).

Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.

What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.

Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.

But this is the issue you guys never tackle. It is all about "baseload" without the slightest understanding about how the demand curve looks.