But Chinese companies are running and building production facilities around the world. Leaving the production in Chinese hands is a political choice, not an inevitability.

Also, you can't take batteries away once you have delivered them to the customer. I have a 14kwh battery in my basement. It's built by BYD, a Chinese company. But once installed, I can pull the network cable and air gap it from the internet. Communication with my roof-mounted-solar and grid-tied electrical supply works without external network access, if I deem that an unacceptable risk. I could also do the work required to filter all network request from the battery management system at the router to make sure it can only contact servers from a whitelist, if I want to have access to diagnostics while I'm not at home.

These are all known, manageable risks that are completely within the capability of sovereign states to take care of. But there is literally no government (apparently) that can keep Trump and Netanyahu from fucking over the global fossil energy supply on a whim.

Yes, but why build nuclear at all, if you are already building PV + batteries? Nuclear is much more expensive than that combination. And if you add nuclear capacity on a level that actually matters (i.e. 30%+ of peak load), you run into real integration problems.

As I've written elsewhere, a toke nuclear program can make sense if you want to keep the industrial base, institutional knowledge and expertise around, i.e. to guarantee independent access to nuclear weapons. But it is ludicrous to make nuclear a cornerstone of your energy policy. Not even China is expanding its share of nuclear in total energy generation. They keep it around as a strategic asset, but a subsidized one.

For countries like Denmark and Spain I'd be pulling my hair out if my government would start throwing money into the money pit that is nuclear power (and it is inevitably is government money, because no nuclear power plant has ever been built without government subsidies and/or price guarantees).

> Nuclear can load follow, within limitations

Yes, but it makes zero economic sense to do so. Nuclear is multiple times more expensive per kwh than PV + batteries, even if you run it at max capacity continuously. If you require nuclear to load follow on a regular basis, not a single reactor will ever be built again.

And as you yourself say: once a battery has been built, it simply exists. There is a very gradual deterioration, but nothing even close to the "just in time" dependency that we are experiencing in this very moment when it comes to fossil fuels.

For a strategic independence point of view, being reliant on a global value chain to replace existing infrastructure every 15 years beats being reliant on a global value chain to replace your tank of gas every day by miles. Don't let perfect become the enemy of good!

The good news is that going 100% renewable is probably less onerous than most people expect. If we get our act together politically, we can easily build the grids, generation, storage and intelligent loads required. With the exception of a few industrial processes, the technology is already existing and economically viable, but it also gets better and cheaper every year.

I never get why people are so opposed to renewables. In the past (and apparently present), we have spent multiples of what we’d need for 100% renewables on stupid wars. Now we could transform our economy with dramatic positive consequences even if we ignore climate change completely (think air quality and corresponding public health concerns, as well as political risks associated with fossil fuels).

It will be one of the breakthrough developments of human civilization and unlock tremendous potential, but people are concerned with the aesthetics of windmills and bickering about minor subsidies, while there is literally an economic crisis going on because some ships with liquified dinosaurs on boats can’t get to their destination on time …

The EU has collectively added 27 Gwh of battery capacity in 2025 alone. If Spain only needs anything close to 2 GW of load for around 2 hours in the morning and evening each, this seems to be inherently achievable.

> you totally can, and for keeping the grid stable, they are absolutely grand.

Nuclear plants can load follow at about 5% of their rated capacity per minute. This is glacial in the world of electricity.

At the moment, this would theoretically work, because you have gas peaker plants that can adjust much faster and pick up the slack while nuclear plants come up (or down) to speed.

But countries like Spain and Denmark want to have a 100% renewable grid within two decades (much shorter than the typical lifetime of a nuclear reactor). So gas peaker plants are increasingly not an option.

The reality of the grid at that point will be a lot of wind and PV capacity (because it is dirt cheap). Nuclear is not compatible with those on its own, because a cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop power much quicker than nuclear will be able to follow.

Of course you can build a ton of batteries to act as a buffer. And guess what, that's exactly what we are doing right now. But at that point, why do we need nuclear again? Simply building batteries is already much cheaper than building a substantial nuclear generation capacity and while batteries will continue to become cheaper while nuclear won't.

Also, if you require new nuclear plants to load follow on a regular basis, it completely destroys the already bad economics of the technology. You need to run those at capacity continuously to make even remotely sense.

For power plants, this is glacial. A power grid has to balanced perfectly on a sub-second level. Also, you can only do this down to about 50% of rated capacity. Below that you have to switch it off completely.

If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart. A cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop generation much faster than nuclear plants will ever be able to follow (by increasing generation). So if you want to have a substantial share of renewable generation (which, remember, is the cheap stuff), you can't have more than a token nuclear capacity, because you need to invest the money you might want to spend on nuclear on battery and hydro storage.

The other aspect is the economics of nuclear itself. Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive generation capacity you can build. Even when driving them at the maximum of their rated capacity, the have a levelized cost of electricity several times that of PV and Wind per kwh. Requiring routine load following for nuclear would basically guarantee that no one ever builds a nuclear reactor again.

There are reasons to build new nuclear, but it's not cheap/reliable power generation. You build it to have access to a nuclear industrial base, as well as the research and professional community to run a military nuclear program. Or you actually succeed in creating a Small Modular Reactor, which might be suitable for niche applications (i.e. power isolated communities in extreme remote locations). Or you are simply fascinated by the technology and want to invest a ton of money on the off chance that it will produce some unforeseen technological breakthrough (though arguably you'd do better with investing in nuclear fusion from my limited understanding of the research).

And my guess would be that it would be much more expensive for you to build out (and hold in reserve) enough generation capacity to satisfy your theoretical peak demand than it costs to have interconnected grids and a large efficient market, even if you are a net exporter.

Many national grids do not have enough renewable generation capacity to satisfy 100% demand at all times yet. When renewable generation is not sufficient, the difference is made up with generation from fossil-fueled thermal plants. But the existence of thermal power plants shouldn't be confused with any form of technical reliance on them. 100% renewable grids are inherently possible. If only, because you can simply enlarge grids geographically to the point that wind and solar production averages out. In combination with planned overcapacity (you can simply "switch off" wind and solar if you don't need generation), you strictly speaking don't even need batteries. It's just much more economical.

Nuclear doesn't vibe well with a grid that is supposed to be dominated by renewable electricity generation. You can't simply increase or decrease nuclear generation and even if you could, it would make the economics even worse, if you wouldn't keep their utilization at maximum capacity.

So if nuclear is supposed to have a "strategic" effect on your electricity mix, you have a substantial (20-40%) block of your electricity generation that is essentially static. That in turn requires you to have static demand. But static demand is poison for a renewable generation. You actually want demand to be highly dynamic via grid-tied batteries and dynamic loads (i.e. electric car charging, scheduled appliances and heating, cost-dependent production) so that it can be tailored to supply and keep the grid stable.

> I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable.

I doubt that this is a requirement for Denmark. There is tremendous hydro capacity in northern Scandinavia and the country is tied into the EU and UK grid.

Also, you can check if there is someone else on your street who has a charger and who might be willing to let you charge in exchange for a little surcharge on the electricity you consume.

Not to speak of the inconvenient fact that Uranium is not a resource found in sufficient quantity in Europe and current European nuclear reactors get their fuel from Russia and Niger, not exactly reliable havens of stability.

Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors to retain the required workforce and research base. For everyone else it is a money sink and a complication when designing their grid for renewable energy.

„Economic development“ can mean many things and there is a scenario where it supports the concept of „well being“ rather than actively undermining it, as it is happening in many places currently.