Real world numbers from the grand renewable energy experiment are not promising.

[hunter]

Last edited Sat Apr 18, 2026, 10:52 PM - Edit history (1)

These are some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations of mine, not from some spreadsheet. It looks to me that nations with aggressive renewable energy programs pay about 40% more for electricity than nuclear powered nations and their carbon intensity is about five times that of nuclear nations.

It's clear to me that renewable energy becomes more expensive than nuclear power before it reaches that celebrated point of "supplying 100%" of a nation's electricity demand for some short amount of time.

As I started writing this here in California nuclear power was carrying about 10% of the load, renewables more than 85%, and gas about 2%. In addition to carrying 10% of the load, nuclear power plays an important roll in maintaining the stability of the grid. If Diablo Canyon was shut down it would be replaced with gas power plants.

Nations with aggressive renewable energy programs are paying over forty cents a kilowatt hour for electricity. Raising these prices even further to install more renewable energy systems would not reduce carbon intensity proportionately. Raising electric rates can, however, lower a nation's carbon dioxide emissions by shrinking the economy. The harshest impacts of a shrinking economy are felt by lower income working class people.

None of these unfavorable non-linear effects exist with nuclear power. A one gigawatt nuclear power plant can replace a one gigawatt fossil fuel power plant one-to-one. If you keep building nuclear power plants you can shut down all of your fossil fuel power plants. France did this. This is reality, it's not hand-waving and creative accounting and conspiracy theories or actual lies about the costs and capabilities of renewable energy.

And here's the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about...

Once you've shut down all your fossil fuel power plants, you can continue to build nuclear power plants and take down all your industrial scale solar and wind "farms" as they wear out and the cost of maintaining them escalates. After that you can make fertilizer and fuels using nuclear power. You can tear down hydroelectric dams and free your rivers...

This is the scenario that scares both the fossil fuel industry and renewable energy enthusiasts.

It scares me too, because there's no limit to growth. ( I used to be rooting for "peak oil" because it would limit growth. We later learned the peak comes after the world as we know it has been destroyed by global heating, which is not the sort of limit I was rooting for.)

Unfortunately we humans have worked ourselves into a corner. Renewable energy alone cannot support 8 billion people. It cannot displace fossil fuels entirely. If we don't quit fossil fuels entirely then billions of people will suffer and die.

Magical energy storage systems don't exist. Fusion power plants may never be practical. But we do have a seventy year old technology that is capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, one that could carry us through a unsettling future.

It's a horrible thing to witness the fantastical beliefs of humans corroding the foundations of the natural world as we have known it and our own civilization. We've got to pay attention to the numbers. Wishful thinking won't save us.

[Metaphorical]

1. I'm not against nuclear, but

Your arguments are a bit disingenuous, especially given your previous posts.

I agree that nuclear offers a solid background, and we need more. At the same time, nuclear has its limitations as well:

Thorium is not widely used as nuclear fuel primarily because it is not fissile (cannot sustain a chain reaction alone), requires expensive, complex reprocessing to become usable, and cannot currently compete with the established, cheaper infrastructure of uranium fuel. While thorium-232 is abundant and fertile, it must be converted into fissile uranium-233, a process that is technologically and economically demanding. U-238 has the same non-fissile characteristics, while U-235, which makes up most nuclear reactors, has Pu-239 as a parent, making processing complicated and hazardous. Most of the byproducts of U-235 are also long lived and radioactive, if not necessarily fissile.

Personally, I think we'll see more Thorium-based reactors - even given the processing complexities, they are still safer than U-235 and the US has ample reserves of Th. However, I expect it will take several decades before that happens on a wide enough scale to make a real difference.

Kinetic and geothermal energy systems have obvious limitations; solar was making inroads before the Great Pumpkin took office, but these were always part of a full spectrum energy strategy. With TFG laying waste to government, I honestly don't see any significant positive energy change beyond reverting to coal and seeing the petroleum sector gouge consumers.

[hunter]

2. Whenever we talk about greenhouse gas emissions it has to be on a global scale.

The earth has only one atmosphere. The political follies of any single nation are of lesser concern. That said, I'd rather not be a cog in the machinery of a nation that is dragging the rest of the world down.

As to your concerns, fuel costs are just a small fraction of the overall cost of financing and operating a nuclear power plant. Reprocessing used fuel and/or breeding fuel from thorium and uranium 238 increases the cost of fuel but it doesn't increase the price of electricity much.

In a fossil fuel power plant as the price of the fuel increases the price of the electricity it produces increases nearly as much. (This does, of course, ignore the environmental costs of fossil fuels that are an existential threat to our civilization.)

Building new nuclear reactors using existing designs is still a good idea even when there are potentially superior designs on the horizon.

To be blunt, we need to face reality. Global warming is getting worse. On one side we have people who refuse to believe that, on the other side we have people who insist renewable energy can support 8 billion people or, at a minimum, significantly postpone the collapse of our civilization.

I'm not going to pretend that nuclear power is going to halt global warming. I do think that maintaining a heavy industrial base using nuclear power instead of fossil fuels will give humanity a lot more room to find the political solutions that will be essential to our own survival and whatever is left of the natural environment we knew.

Solar panels obliterating many square miles of living desert and giant wind farms don't solve any fundamental problems. We've explored their capabilities at gigawatt scales and they've come up short. At the same time I don't begrudge anyone the solar panels on their roof or their super-efficient automobile. Our society really doesn't offer us many ways to reduce our own environmental footprint beyond grinding poverty. The smallest environmental footprint I ever had was living in my broken car in a church parking lot scavenging food out of trash cans. Thankfully I had access to flush toilets connected to a modern sewage treatment plant and clean fresh water. Everyone on earth deserves flush toilets connected to modern sewage treatment systems and clean fresh water. Providing those simple things to eight billion people requires reliable high density energy resources.

[NNadir]

3. I have a slight correction, inasmuch as the carbon intensity of German electricity is not 5 times that of France...

...it's more than 10 times that of France.

The figures can be found, using the 12 month data, at the Electricity Map

As of this writing, the 12 month carbon intensity of France is 23 grams CO₂/kWh, whereas that of fossil fuel Germany is 320 grams CO₂/kWh.

The fact that the German economy is collapsing because of high electricity prices will not stop fossil fuel promoting antinukes from chanting (gaslighting, literally) that nuclear energy is expensive and so called "renewable energy" is "cheap."

When full system costs - the need for redundancy, almost always using fossil fuel plants, although batteries - with their own terrible environmental impact - are sold by the "renewable energy will save us" morons as a solution. There isn't enough cobalt on the planet, nor dysprosium, nor indium, nor even copper, to make so called "renewable energy" ever get to the roughly 30 Exajoules of primary energy has been producing for decades in an atmosphere of catcalls by uneducated idiots.

This outcome is because antinukes have never, any more than the care about the environment or the state of the atmosphere, thought about future generations. They are unwilling to spend a dime on future generations, because they're selfish little bourgeois buggers. The chief expenditure of nuclear power is the cost of the infrastructure, and since the infrastructure will last for close to a century, with possible pauses for refurbishment (as we're seeing in Canada at the Bruce reactors), a nuclear plant is a gift to future generations.

The renewable junk will all be a liability when today's toddlers are in college, by contrast.

The German economy is in a tailspin because of the rhetoric of antinukes, and the high costs of so called "renewable energy" and the fossil fuels on which so called "renewable energy" is totally dependent.

The fact that this is well known will not stop the fossil fuel sales people who come here rebranding fossil fuels as "hydrogen" from gaslighting the claim that so called "renewable energy" is cheap.

As for growth, I can say this: The elimination of poverty reduces birth rates. This is observed world wide. Many people have a problem with reduced birth rates, but over the long term, they represent a way to reduce the need and value of growth. In theory they would allow for economic contraction in a way that prevents, rather than promotes, suffering. Unfortunately, the observed fall of birth rates in wealthy countries falls into, as the rising recognition of the environmental and economic value of nuclear energy is realized, the rubric of "too little, too late."

[hunter]

4. I left out Germany for a few reasons.

Germany still has regions where "Coal is King," more so than the United States. The labor unions supporting the coal industry are much stronger than unions in the United States. Some industries have their own coal fired power plants. The people in these regions will resist any changes to the status quo.

There's little room for further hydropower development in Germany. This resource has been fully exploited. New pumped storage capacity would be incredibly expensive. Hydropower can mask many of the deficiencies of wind and solar power. On reason wind and solar power in California could expand as rapidly as it did was that many of the state's water projects had not yet been optimized to source and sink electric power. Adding wind and solar to the California electric grid heightened the incentives to do this.

The biggest failing of Germany was it's faith in Putin. They thought thought they could get Putin to behave himself if they increased German economic ties to Russia. In their Utopian vision Germany would build the best non-nuclear hybrid gas / wind / solar electric grid in the world and Putin would see the light and embrace the political and economic principles of the European Union. That's not what happened.

( My personal opinions, of course, and subject to change... )

[thought crime]

5. The argument against renewable energy is based on theory.

I appreciate your thoughtful post. It’s much more pleasant and persuasive than some of the crude attacks on renewable energy I’ve seen in this forum that rely on repetitive distortions. We can have discussions without resorting to zealotry and bigotry.

I agree that nuclear power has some theoretical advantages. Yes. If you keep building nuclear power plants you could eventually replace all fossil fuel power plants, but there are practical questions about this. Do you really see this happening? France is held up as a unique example, but the French government aims for 35% of electricity generation to be renewable by 2030. Major offshore projects, including the 1.5 GW Centre Manche 2 farm, are underway. The government has launched tenders for 12 GW of renewable energy, focusing heavily on offshore wind. Solar is growing rapidly, with targets to reach 54–60 GW of capacity by 2030. The shift toward wind and solar is central to reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

A great advantage of renewable energy is that the production cycle is much simpler: extraction, processing, and operation are all done at the same site, without intermediate transportation costs. Nuclear energy requires extraction of uranium and transport and processing of the uranium to nuclear fuel. There are additional costs associated with storage of nuclear waste that are very high when you project them out to the lifetime of that waste material. Overall, renewable energy is successful because of its relative safety, simplicity, and flexibility that allow it to work well within a market based economic system. We can fully expect that costs for renewable energy will continue to decrease.

Both France and China are using both renewable and nuclear energy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. That’s the valuable example they provide. I count myself as a renewable energy enthusiast but the scenario of nuclear energy replacing renewable energy doesn't "scare me" at all; I just don't see any possibility of that happening when there is super abundant solar and wind energy.