They produced an excess of energy with renewable. For how long? What energy are they importing when they’re not? What fossile energy are they using to provide when they don’t? What about countries farther than 100km extremely windy sea?
Why should nuclear and renewable be opposed btw?
What fossil fuel will they import in the next 10-20 years that it will take to make the nuclear plants?
Nuclear and renewables shouldn’t be opposed. Ideally we would have both. The problem is we needed to stop burning fossil fuels a long time ago so we don’t have another 10-20 years to keep burning fossil fuels while we wait for nuclear plants to be made.
The fossil fuel industry knows that if we take the nuclear ONLY route that we will continue to burn their fuels for decades longer. So they lobby to support that option, hoping that a lot or some of the nuclear plants will never even get finish like we’ve seen happen so many times.
In addition to that, countries don’t have infinite money to spend on energy. So any amount of the budget spent on nuclear will mean less spent on solar and wind. Solar and wind are the only sources that can be deployed fast enough to allow us to avoid extinction.
It doesn’t take 20 years to build a nuclear power plant.
But it’s been 20 years Germany decided to get away from nuclear energy, and now they are the proud biggest co2 emmiter in Europe. And now importing fossil fuel from the US to power their energy. How many more years do you think it would take to power Germany with renewables when they were so determined to leave nuclear for the sake of ecology?
It isn’t an opposition, but a matter of priority.
The goal is to switch off fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Nuclear takes a long time, renewables can be done quickly - very quickly.
If we spend money on nuclear, that’s money that could have been spent on renewables, money that could have turned off fossil fuel generation more quickly. Thus it makes more sense -right now- to spend money on renewables. Once we have an excess of renewables and have reached net zero, then nuclear builds should come into play. While the nuclear is being built, rotating stabilisers can be installed to provide voltage & frequency stability.
It’s been 20 years that Germany decided to stop nuclear energy. They’re burning coal and gas since then, and it got us an energy crisis last year. It’s not faster to deploy renewable.
Mean time to build a nuclear power plant is 7.5 years btw. Not 20. But I’m sure 20 is a lot better for the narrative.
You’re deliberately trying to conflate the time from before-site-selection to a finished plant with the time for finishing a particular reactor after ground breaking. An analogy would be claiming the average time for a solar plant is three minutes because screwing one panel on takes that long.
Switching off nuclear early is a mistake (excluding any technical concerns driving a shutdown). In my opinion, shutdown of a nuclear plant should be staged with completion of a new power plant on the same site. Half the regulatory paperwork is already there if it’s already a nuclear site.
Sweden are targeting 10 plants by 2045, in just over 20 years. Those 10 plants are probably already proposed and partially designed.
In 7.5 years you could build and energise a shit ton of renewables, and the infrastructure needed to connect it from various remote locations, using less than a quarter of the money they’re proposing here.
From what I can tell the biggest hurdle in Sweden is transmission infrastructure to make use of renewable capacity and potential. For Germany, pulling a guess out of my ass, I’d wager it’s more of a “Not In My BackYard” situation that’s clogged up development of onshore wind.
