This is something that has been occasionally happening in Europe (at least in Germany, don’t know about France) for well over 10 years now. Probably more like 15.
What’s sorely needed at this point is much more storage to make this energy available when it is needed instead of when it isn’t. Before that happens, you cannot really decommission any gas or coal power plants, because you still need them during times of much less renewable production.
this is why we still need nuclear, to replace the fossil fuel baseline.
Amazing how you get downvoted with no reply even though your comment is the truth. People who claim to be environmentalists who are also against nuclear energy are seriously dumb.
Answering from a German perspective:
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Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.
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Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
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Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
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There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don’t answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side
And alas, we continue to put more CO2 into the air and the planet keeps warming.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I’m also not convinced it’s a good long-term strategy based on the other points I’ve mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn’t really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it’s just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
watch us be repeating the same excuse in another 50 years. yes, nuclear takes a long time to build but that doesn’t mean we should just not do it.
also at the bare minimum we should not be shutting down functional reactors which is happening in europe.
Answering from a German perspective:
The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a “net-zero” carbon solution. But that’s bullshit.
The german solution was to build more coal power
No, that wasn’t the solution and it’s not what happened, coal is in decline in Germany since the 90s with a rather steep decline since 2018.
That is true but that isn’t a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying “told you so” if you need it so badly. I don’t really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It’s a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Why do you not include city-scale energy storage as wishful thinking? Unlike nuclear reactors, that amount of storage doesn’t exist.
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The concept of baseline power is no longer needed. Scientists wrote about that for years now. Battery storage and smart grids are growing faster and cheaper than nuclear ever could.
Can storage technology reach 100% coverage by 2050? Because that’s the target for net-0 afaik.
If not, we should invest in something else to help us reach that goal, and Nuclear seems the most promising medium-term solution.
If there was enough funding or political backing anything could get done by 2050. That’s a huge amount of time. Any time someone mentions a climate goalpost like that they are pulling the cloth over your eyes
France has plenty of nuclear power.
It doesn’t help with renewable peaks in the slightest.What is needed are storage solutions and flexible usage that can utilize cheap power at peak times.
I’m a Fiscally Responsible American Republican and this is EXACTLY why we SHOULDN’T transition away from Oil! Imagine all the RESEARCH into YACHTS and MANSIONS the CEOS can’t do now that prices are NEGATIVE!
Prices go negative in Texas somewhat regularly
In Texas so does the grid.
Doesn’t mean much when it collapses due to weather.
Negative? Sounds like music to the crypto-miners. Heck, can I get paid for shorting two wires together?
Am I the only one that doesn’t understand how something could fall into a negative price range? Like does that mean the power companies have to pay the people using power? And how is power being that cheap a problem in any way? Isn’t cheap accessible power what we’ve been striving to achieve??
Yet whenever prices for something go negative we’re never paid for taking it off their hands.
Though it won’t show up as negative in the bill, not even a discount
If you have a dynamic pricing contract of course you get a discount… If you don’t, you chose not to in return for price stability 🤷
Though yeah, last time prices went negative in Germany I was still paying 10ct/kWh in just taxes and fees. Would be pretty cool if they’d have paid me for using electricity during that time, but of course that’s not how that works.
Lemmy and the nuclear propaganda is so funny. France recently increased the electricity prices because nuclear energy is way more expensive than solar and they will have to increase them again because half of their plants are in severe need of repair.
It’s a tricky thing, but renewables and nuclear fission plants are not two mutually exclusive things that can’t coexist. The issue with renewables is that, right now, they are not consistent enough to be relied upon 24/7, and we don’t have, right now, a good enough storage technology to solve the issue.
Without this, the only other option is to have renewables cover 30-50% of the production capacity, and another technology to provide a base capacity when renewables cannot be used. This can be hydro, if you have it, nuclear, gas or coal. Choose your poison.
