Nuclear is more flexible than coal and on par with some gas plants. BWR's are even faster. Your second link about french modulation proves that. Or you can check directly on RTE website

EDF is crying because ren get CFD's and curtailment payments while EDF does not.

The paper you posted is so funny. The author is also the chief editor of the journal the paper was published. He is also one of the founders of DK antinuclear movement which resulted in DK becoming one of the largest coal consumers at that time. His previous paper was subject to correction due to favorably "omitted details". His current paper still assumes for some reason dirt cheap hydrogen firming for renewables. Shall we check the cost of pure H2 firming per Lazard?

Not only DK has worse emissions than France - it also managed to piss off Norway and Sweden https://montelnews.com/news/0138d712-3afd-4590-883e-4b9221fd...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-pauses-plans-...

Also. Why get less decarbonization by wasting money and opportunity on new built nuclear power when we still need to decarbonize construction, agriculture, shipping, showroom, industry? - in this case let's spend zero money on ren deployment too. Electrification will bring much greater results due to efficiency gains even if the grid is powered in it's current form. Such arguments are silly.

Germany does in fact seem to have tons of money. It spent on EEG alone so far double the cost of entire french nuclear fleet. In the meantime it got highest household prices in EU after Ireland. From this year govt decided to funnel additional 6bn/y on transmission. I'm not even talking about tons of fossils subsidies

Yes, in Fukushima it would have been much better, even if there was fuel rod fire, due to... better plant design...

Fukushima costs are blown out because Japanes govt wanted it this way. Just like JP govt forced long term evacuation even if the doses both during and after event were not life threatening.

"Seriously, why are we doing things like this when we have cheaper, faster and safer options? Why are we not instead going for the options?" - like what? Renewables firmed by gas and coal like in Germany? You are aware it spent on it's transition so far much more than France spent on nuclear while achieving worse results, while killing thousands from coal pollution in the meantime? So Germany spent more, achieved much less in much longer time. And on top it plans further gas expansion to firm renewables. This is not a cheaper/faster/safer way. It's the exact opposite in all directions.

"It will require so much batteries" Yes. So let's get started, we can build as many batteries as we need 10 times over. "Synth fuels are inefficient", yes, but that doesn't matter when the electricity is close to free." - electricity for synth will not be free and bess will eat into it's economics. Synth fuel infra isn't cheap either. Using H2 for firming is a pipedream pushed by fossil industry to justify expanding gas infrastructure.

It has to be nuclear + renewables. That's the difference - we already know it works good looking at Sweden and France. Others that tried to follow pipedreams ended up worse

Germany is about to spend over 600bn for grid expansion till 2045 and EEG subsidies for the next 10 years will too, be about 200bn (if not cancelled by govt which is unlikely unless AFD is elected)

France downscaled ren deployment plans while pushing for 6 new EPR2's + another 8 if there aren't major delays.

So not only France needs to spend/subsidize less in this period - it'll also still have cleaner grid and lower household prices than Germany in parallel

Since the goal of energy transition is first and foremost decarbonization, if you close a low carbon source while keeping higher carbon sources, you can say that the worst polluter replaced the closed source

The structure of my comment is privileging coal because it has the worst emissions in the context of the ultimate decarbonization goal (among other nasty enviromental impacts from it). That's why it's coal that replaced nuclear and not renewables nor gas.

Still, no CFDs were given to them. So it's not about state reducing subsidies. Nor was it about environment regulations.

The high costs of recent western projects are more related to depleted supply chain and poor designs of the plants. We'll get a chance soon to observe how Canada and Korea will build in Europe. Both have much better supply chain and both want to build (Czechia- apr and Romania -candu). If both will have the same cost blows as flamanville then it's clearly related to EU itself. If not- then the problem was EDF incompetence specifically here and Westinghouse incompetence in US

Lazard doesn't (or at least didn't) estimate the plants to work for 60y either considering all gen 3 are licensed for this period. Lazard also has interesting numbers about LCOE of ren+cheap gas firming. Would be interesting to see the added cost of transmission, considering Germany spends 10x more than France per year on it

Asse is an experimental facility without plans to extract the waste if experiment fails. Still, no public was or will be harmed since it's mostly LLW, 75% for medical and research sectors. It has nothing to do with proper deep geological repository like Onkalo. It costed 1bn to build and will cost 4bn to operate for a century with periodical topups. That's dirt cheap considering amount of power from nuclear in that period.

Nobody was affected by recent Chernobyl strikes. The tragedy there is of another kind- damaged outer dome which is expensive and equipment that was prepared to start corium cleanup was damaged, postponing the process.

Security efforts are not that expensive if compared to amount of power

China is still one of the worst global polluters and is expanding coal to use it to firm renewables. It also expands nuclear but nowhere near at the rate of France during Messmer or swedish BWR expansion. Synth fuel is nothing more than an expensive pipedream.

"do realize that across such a lifespan essentially the entire nuclear plant except the pressure vessel and outer shell is replaced?" - so you are saying that EDF replaced/will replace all the components except PV of it's plants to reach 60-80y? This sounds ridiculous. Maintenance isn't free but is part of opex of a plant which for existing ones is rather low.

"Who cares if the emergency reserves are fossil gas when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, construction, aviation, industry, maritime shipping and so on?" - many.

German EEG/y spending is about to increase because it's paid more frequently despite most expensive contracts being over. And for offshore this already didn't pan out well. Solar has the advantage of lower capex but will be hit too.

Nuclear requires far less overcapacity and transmission. You can cycle maintenance schedules and if country's demand is smaller, you build smaller units like Candu to make this rotation.